Opera Singer Helps Students Get Free Voice Lessons

Steve Adubato goes One-on-One with Michael Fabiano, Operatic Tenor and Philanthropist, to discuss his career at the MET and how his organization, ArtSmart, is providing free voice lessons to students who lack access to music education.

12/17/18 #2186

 

 

 

 

Excerpt:

"Damn you can sing! [laughter] That is Michael Fabiano, who is an operatic tenor, a philanthropist, we'll talk about that in just a bit, born and raised where? Well, born in New Jersey. I was actually born in Montclair, New Jersey. My hometown. Well no, I'm born in Newark and moved up to Montclair. You are from Montclair originally? Yeah. Originally Montclair, Verona, Cedar Grove, all that area. Hoboken... When did you start singing? I started singing when I was... it's tough to say. I sang as a kid. But really, when I was in college it started. So when you were a kid... I always say this to people on the air, my mother was playing Vivaldi 24/7 in our house. Right? How about you? Opera? It wasn't opera in our house, but both of my parents studied music. So we had Dvorak playing Beethoven on, a lot of that stuff. And then my mother was a musical theater girl. So she had a lot of the Rodgers and Hammerstein stuff playing on cassette tapes, when that still existed back then. It was always in the docket, but never was in my head that it was gonna be my career. It's so interesting. So talk to us about what we were just seeing. La Boheme. For those who don't appreciate or understand. Well, La Boheme. I mean, I'm doing it right now at the Metropolitan Opera. There are three more performances in this run. La Boheme is for me, probably the greatest opera ever written, because it is truly about the human element of life and death. What it's like when two people meet, that cataclysmic, that magnificent moment, of meeting someone and finding love immediately. And the opposite boomerang effect of what it's like to witness death before your eyes, and how that feels. And what I do as an artist on stage is, even though obviously, Mimi is not dying in real life, I try to tap into emotion of someone in my life that has died, and where I've gone to get close to that, so I can bring that element into the performance. And so I can bring the rest of the public with me. By the way, we should give a shout-out to your uncle Joe, who is a good friend of ours back in New Jersey. I call it Down Neck, but it's really the Ironbound section of Newark, New Jersey. He runs a great non-profit there, Joe Della Fave. Yeah. He's a good man. He's a great guy. Music in your family... I'm just gonna get you talking about that. Your first opportunity to perform in public, in front of an audience was..."