Faculty

• Ellen Douglas Schlaefer, Director of Opera Studies
• Walter Cuttino, Associate Professor; Tenor
• Lynn Kompass, vocal coach
• Tina Milhorn Stallard Assistant Professor; Soprano
• Helene Tintes, Assistant Professor; Contralto
• Jacob Will, Assistant Professor, Bass-baritone
• Laury Christie, Emeritus Professor; Soprano, Alexander Technique
• Donald N. Gray, Emeritus Professor; Baritone

ELLEN DOUGLAS SCHLAEFER, Director of Opera Studies joined the School of Music in 2004. She has staged Faust for The Washington Opera; La Boheme and Romeo et Juliette with the National Symphony Orchestra (Wolf Trap Opera); Aida (The Connecticut Opera); the Francesca Zambello production of The Little Prince (Houston Grand Opera, Tulsa Opera), The Magic Flute (Opera Memphis,Houston Ebony Opera Guild); La Boheme (Michigan Opera Theatre, Opera Carolina, Connecticut Opera, Augusta Opera); Porgy & Bess (Opera Illinois,Connecticut Opera); La Traviata (Cleveland Opera, Opera Memphis,Connecticut Opera); Rigoletto ( Opera Carolina ,Piedmont Opera); Salome, Norma, Die Fledermaus, Tosca, the Ballad of Baby Doe , Il Tabbaro, Romeo et Juliette (Connecticut Opera); Madama Butterfly (Artpark & Co., Connecticut Opera, Houston Ebony Opera); Lucia di Lammermoor (Orlando Opera); Fidelio (Cleveland Opera); I Pagliacci (Eugene Opera,Connecticut Opera). Other operas include La Dolorosa, The Face on the Barroom Floor, Luisa Fernanda, and Bastien & Bastienne (Santa Fe Opera Apprentice Tour); Amahl & the Night Visitors, Gianni Schicchi (Dayton Opera); The Medium (Augusta Opera); The Telephone (Augusta Opera,Dayton Opera); Le Ville, Edgar, Martha, Linda diI Chamounix, La Pietra del Paragon and The Toy Shop (Opera Theatre of Northern Virginia)
Additional directing projects include the dramas I Am My Own Wife for Workshop Theatre of South Carolina, The Goat or Who is Sylvia (Trustus Theatre) Master Class, Grace & Glorie, You Can't Take it With You and The Sister Rosensweig (Workshop Theatre of SC); musicals She Loves Me (Coastal Carolina University): A Chorus Line, South Pacific, Oklahoma, The Merry Widow and The King & I (Artpark, Lewiston, NY) Sweeney Todd for Workshop Theatre and The Princeton Festival (Princeton , NJ)

Dedicated to arts education, Schlaefer is founder and general director of FBN Productions, Inc. Opera for Kids, a touring company based in South Carolina, specializing in bringing opera into the schools of the Southeast. FBN has shared the joys of live opera with over 150,000 young people. www.operaforkids.org She has also worked with the young artist programs for The Santa Fe Opera, Wolf Trap Opera, Opera Carolina, Baltimore Opera, Pittsburgh Opera, Connecticut Opera, Houston Ebony Opera Guild, Dayton Opera, Intermezzo and Opera Colorado. Upcoming engagements include The Abduction from the Seraglio for The Connecticut Opera.

Walter Cuttino, Associate Professor of Voice
Walter Cuttino received his Bachelor of Music in Voice from the University of South Carolina and his Master of Music in Voice and an Artist Diploma in Opera from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. Upon completing his formal education, Mr. Cuttino performed throughout Europe, with over 950 operatic appearances to his credit. Ferrando in Mozart's Così fan tutte, Count Almaviva in Rossini's The Barber of Seville, Tamino in Mozart's The Magic Flute, Lenski in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, and Rodolfo in Puccini's La Bohème are among the more than 40 roles in his repertoire. He has also performed over 250 concerts, including a concert tour with the late Leonard Bernstein to London and Moscow. He has been on the University of South Carolina faculty since 1996. In April 2007 he appeared as Alfredo in La Traviata with the University of Florida.

Lynn Kompass, Assistant Professor of Voice, Vocal Coach
Pianist Lynn Kompass maintains an active career as vocal coach, chamber musician, recital collaborator, and teacher. She has been teaching at the University of South Carolina since 2002. Ms. Kompass has participated in the Steans Vocal Institute (Ravinia Music Festival), Aspen Music Festival, and the Banff Centre for the Arts, where she worked with Margo Garrett, Roger Vignoles, and Martin Isepp.
As an opera coach, Ms. Kompass has worked at the University of Michigan, University of Tennessee, Aspen Opera Theater, Palmetto Opera, and Opera Brasil. Ms. Kompass has also performed in association with Ravinia Music Festival, Chicago Opera Theater, Chicago Chamber Musicians, Michigan Chamber Players, and Chicago Civic Orchestra. Her performances this past season have included recitals at Weill Recital Hall in New York City, Strings in the Mountain Festival, University of Texas at Austin, and the International Conference of Arts and Humanities in Honolulu. Lynn Kompass received her graduate degrees in Collaborative Piano at the University of Michigan, where she studied with Martin Katz and Katherine Collier.

TINA MILHORN STALLARD, Soprano Assistant professor

Active as a concert artist, soprano Tina Milhorn Stallard has performed solos in works such as Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem, Haydn’s The Creation, Bach’s St. John Passion, and Handel’s Messiah. She is a featured soloist on the soon-to-be released recording of the Vocal Arts Ensemble of Cincinnati. Tina has apprenticed with Central City Opera, Cincinnati Opera, and Kentucky Opera, and her operatic roles include Beth in Little Women at Opera Omaha and Central City, Barbarina in the Italian premier of Argento’s Casanova’s Homecoming at the Opera Theatre and Music Festival of Lucca, and Abigail in The Crucible at the College-Conservatory of Music. In addition, she was a national finalist of the Artist Awards sponsored by the National Association of Teachers of Singing, district winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, semi-finalist of the Eleanor McCollum Competition sponsored by Houston Grand Opera and winner of the Grace Moore Vocal Competition. She received the Doctorate of Musical Arts from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music where she studied with Barbara Honn, and is an alumnus of Belmont University and the University of Kentucky. Dr. Stallard is an Assistant Professor of Voice at USC

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Helen Tintes-Schuermann, Contralto
Assistant Professor

Helen Tintes-Schuermann joined the USC faculty in 2001, where she teaches Applied Voice to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as Basic Vocal Pedagogy and the Opera Survey. Her students have won numerous awards at both the NATS and Metropolitan District Competitions and are working as performers and educators in the United States and in Europe. Tintes is an active performer in recital, opera and concert.
The contralto made her operatic debut at the Staatstheater Kassel (Germany) in Richard Strauss' Elektra and has performed numerous operatic roles in Europe and the United States. Favorite roles include Carmen, Azucena (Il Trovatore), the Zia Principessa (Suor Angelica), and Elizabeth Proctor (The Crucible). She has appeared at many European Festivals in staged repertoire of the Baroque and Twentieth Century, including the Alte Opera (Frankfurt), Fest in Hellbrunn (Salzburg), the Ascona Festival (Switzerland), and the Bodensee Festival (Switzerland), as well as performing in Elektra with Dame Gwyneth Jones with the famed Teatro del Gran Liceu in Barcelona, Spain.
An experienced concert soloist, Tintes has sung works of Mozart, Haydn, and Vivaldi at the Festival du Printemps in Monte Carlo, St. Stephen's Cathedral (Vienna), the Salzburg Cathedral, and the Festival of Religious Music in Cuenca, Spain. She has given numerous song recitals in Europe and the USA and specializes in the German and Spanish/Latin-American repertoire. The contralto has also appeared in works of Music Theater, including the role of Madame Giry in Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera with Theater an der Wien (Vienna), with Light Opera Works of Chicago (Kismet), and in Phillip Glass' Akhnaten with Chicago Opera Theatre.
Since coming to South Carolina, Tintes has performed frequently with orchestras in the Southeast. She sang the Verdi Requiem with both the Augusta Symphony and the USC Symphony under the direction of Dr. Donald Portnoy, as well as Bernstein's Jeremiah Symphony and Handel's Messiah at USC. She also soloed with the South Carolina Philharmonic, with the S.C. Symphonic Chorale, with the Charlotte Symphony, and with the Naples Bach Ensemble. This past season, Tintes was alto soloist in Mozart's Requiem for the Columbia Mozart Festival, as well as performing the Requiem in Austria with the USC Concert Choir. She also performed in concert in Spain and gave recitals and masterclasses in China for the Yantai Music Festival. She is the director of the new International Spanish Music Course, held for the first time in the summer of 2006.
Tintes holds degrees from the University of Minnesota, the Escuela de Canto (Madrid, Spain), the Hochschule “Mozarteum” (Salzburg, Austria), and the Doctor of Music degree from Northwestern University.

(PHOTO: Ms. Tintes-Schuermann as Madame Flora in The Medium (Columbia College 2005 production,photo by Sidney Palmer)

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Jacob Will, Bass-baritone
Assistant Professor

Bass-baritone Jacob Will made his New York Philharmonic debut as soloist in the American Premiere of the Messa per Rossini, a performance televised live nationwide.

An experienced concert artist, Mr. Will has appeared with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Vladamir Ashkenazy and with the Cabrillo Festival under the baton of Dennis Russell Davies. He has sung with the San Francisco Symphony in the St. Matthew Passion, with the International Bach Festival of Schaffhausen, Switzerland in the St. John Passion, and with the Vienna Symphonic Orchestra in Frank Martin's Le mystère de la Nativité. He has also recorded Cherubini’s Messe solennelle under Helmuth Rilling and Zemlinsky’s Kleider Machen Leute under Ralf Weikert.

Mr. Will has sung for many years with the Zürich Opera appearing in roles such as Raimondo in Lucia di Lammermoor, Mustafa in L'Italiana in Algeri, and Colline in La Boheme. Other companies with which Mr. Will has appeared include the New York City Opera as Figaro in Le Nozze di Figaro, Vancouver Opera as Oroveso in Norma, the Bavarian State Opera as Samuel in Un Ballo in Maschera and the San Francisco Opera as Masetto in Don Giovanni.

A native of Hartsville, South Carolina, Mr. Will attended Furman University and graduated from the University of South Carolina and the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. He participated in the Merola and Adler Fellowship Programs of the San Francisco Opera and has been a prizewinner in various international singing competitions including the Munich Competition and the Queen Elizabeth Competition of Brussels.

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Laury Christie, Soprano
Emeritus Professor Voice and Alexander Technique

Laury Christie has had an extensive singing career that bridges the USA and Europe. She has performed over 30 major opera roles in the lyric and coloratura soprano repertoire. Her solo debut was with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. She sang in a concert version of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas conducted by Antonio Janegro. Her operatic stage debut followed with the Milwaukee Opera as Queen of the Night in Mozart's The Magic Flute.

Ms. Christie made her European debut in Münster, Germany, with the City Theater, under the musical direction of Alfred Walter, as Zerbinetta in Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos. Other engagements included theaters in Detmold, Karlsruhe, Osnabrück, Innsbruck, Stuttgart, and Hannover, as lead lyric-coloratura.

Ms. Christie has performed with renowned conductors Georg Solti, Antonio Janegro, Erich Leinsdorf, Carl Maria Giulini, Margaret Hillis, and Robert Shaw.

Appearances in the USA include soloist with the Boston, Chicgao, and Milwaukee Symphonies, at Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, SC, and on public radio.

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Donald Gray Baritone
Emeritus Professor

Donald Gray has been a member of the voice faculty since 1972. His students have enjoyed success in numerous competitions. Some have proceeded to professional singing careers while others have gone on to successful careers as educators at various levels.

Dr. Gray has a varied background as singer, opera director, and choral conductor. He has been a Metropolitan Opera audition winner and in 1972 won the second annual Mario Lanza Competition. His roles include standard parts such as Count Almaviva, Papageno, Don Alfonzo, Marcello, Rigoletto, and the Elder Germont, as well as a host of roles from twentieth-century repertoire. The most significant of these was the title role in Isang Yun's The Butterfly Widow, performed at the Chicago Lyric Opera in 1971.

In 1984, Dr. Gray was singled out for honor by The State newspaper in its "Ten for the Future" program.

Equally comfortable in recital, oratorio, and opera, he numbers among his most recent performances baritone soloist in Orff's Carmina Burana with the South Carolina Philharmonic Orchestra, the title roles in Mozart's Don Giovanni and Verdi's Rigoletto with OPERA at USC, and Schubert's Die Winterreise.

As a conductor, Dr. Gray served four seasons as director of The Palmetto Mastersingers, releasing two critically acclaimed compact disc recordings, and he has been Director of Music at Eastminster Presbyterian Church for the past twenty-one years.

Dr. Gray received the degree of Doctor of Music from Northwestern University. He is a past-president of the South Carolina chapter of NATS and served several terms as Governor of the South Carolina chapter of NOA. In 1972, he established the USC Opera Workshop, and he served for twenty seasons as director of the Columbia Lyric Opera. In 1999, he directed Britten's Albert Herring with OPERA at USC.