07/24/2007

Summer stock with a Twist

Bay View Association offers aspiring singers and musicians a chance to polish their skills

By
Record-Eagle staff writer

BAY VIEW — Hallie Silverston is on the fast track to a professional singing career, but it's the life of a millworker that drew her to Bay View.

"I'd seen that they had planned on doing 'Carousel' this summer, and Julie Jordan is a role I have always wanted to play,” said Silverston, a student at the Bay View Conservatory of Music from Grenada, Calif.

One of about 40 vocal and instrumental students at the conservatory, an offshoot of the historic Bay View Association's Summer Assembly Program, Silverston plays the leading role in the musical that opens July 26. It's one of some 60 student, faculty and guest artist performances taking place June 17-Aug. 12 as part of the Bay View Music Festival, the oldest of its kind in the country.

A recent graduate of the Eastman School of Music with a master's degree in voice performance and literature, Silverston, 23, said she read about Bay View in Classical Singer magazine. Although her father was born in Detroit, this is the first time she's been "Up North.”

"I feel like I'm on vacation,” she said. "I get to do what I love to do in a gorgeous location with nice people — it doesn't get any better than that. Even though the schedule is stressful and crazy, we get to walk home every day and see the lake. We spend our Saturdays as beach bums. It's hard to be unhappy here.”

Like her classmates from around the world — this summer's Conservatory crop includes students from Brazil, Puerto Rico and Korea — Silverston spends her days at classes, lessons and rehearsals, almost all in Victorian-era buildings. Adjacent to Petoskey and directly across Little Traverse Bay from Harbor Springs, Bay View is a National Historic Landmark, with 438 summer cottages built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

It's also one of the nation's few remaining chautauquas, a movement of the same period designed to bring education, religion, culture and recreation to rural communities.

Evenings and Sundays are devoted to rehearsals and performances at Bay View, local churches and other area venues. Bay View's Sunday worship services and popular vesper concerts draw thousands to Hall Auditorium each season.

As much as she's enjoying the region — students can sail on the bay, visit nearby Mackinac Island or Sleeping Bear Dunes and shop downtown Petoskey with its popular July sidewalk sale — Silverston said networking with other students is better.

"That's one of the best things about the summer: we get to be big nerds and talk shop all the time,” she said. Favorite classes include a master class with visiting artist and international opera baritone Timothy Noble and "Thriving in the Arts,” which focuses on the business side of performing, from resume and grant writing to auditioning and setting up a private studio.

"It's kind of all the information that nobody teaches but they expect you to know,” she said.

Those skills will come in handy when Silverston moves to New York at the end of the summer. Like Conservatory alumni Gabe Lewis-O'Connor, a member of the vocal group Chanticleer, and Shuler Hensley, 2002 Tony Award-winning actor for the Broadway revival of "Oklahoma!”, she plans to pursue a performing career.

"Hallie is a very fine singer and a lovely person,” said Risa Renae Harman, a freelance vocalist in New York and artist-in-residence at Bay View. "She's got a really charming stage personality that kind of pops when you see her on stage and her voice is very versatile, which in today's market can be a really good thing.

"She seems to have a thing for crossover music, which has a need for beautiful, trained, legitimate singing, yet she won our aria competition. She sang a flashy aria that is very difficult to sing and she tossed that off like it was nothing. At this age, the world is her oyster.”

Brian Eid is spending his third summer at Bay View, where he won last year's concerto competition and has performed with the faculty brass quintet two years in a row.

"The second trumpet position is treated kind of like an assistantship,” said Eid, a recent graduate of Western Michigan University. "I don't get paid but I don't have to pay to be here at the same time. I get to play next to my professor and that's kind of a treat.”

Besides waiving the $2,900 tuition fee, which many students offset with jobs or scholarships, the unique position comes with a few other privileges, he said — like getting to live in faculty housing and having plenty of extra time.

"It is a conservatory, so there's lots of time to practice. There's also time to hang out and be at the beach,” he said. "It's basically just a place for me to relax and get away from school and practice trumpet. School doesn't always provide that. It's like a leveling off each summer.”

Scott Thornburg, Eid's trumpet instructor at Bay View and WMU and a frequent performer in southwest Michigan, calls the West Bloomfield musician creative and hardworking, with a natural musical instinct. He said the traits will serve him well at UCLA, where Eid is headed this fall to pursue a master's degree with Jens Lindemann, one of the most celebrated soloists in the trumpet's history.

'The whole music scene out there, the studio work, is definitely something I'm excited about,” said Eid, 23, who is considering a career as a soloist or an orchestral or chamber musician. "I've been classically trained but I want to be a universal player — classical, jazz. I don't want to be labeled.”

While the energy students bring to the Bay View festival has been embraced by the community, not all Conservatory alumni will go on to performing careers, said festival artistic director Chris Ludwa.

"We choose faculty that we think are prime examples of what it is to have a performing and teaching career,” he said. "Virtuosos like (violinist) Joshua Bell, that can make their way and make their living simply by performing, are few and far between. As a matter of fact, he was just hired by his alma mater to be on the university faculty. There's always an element of 'pay it back,' which speaks to the philosophy of chautauqua and Bay View. Which is: it's not just you, but what you give back to the world.”