Seagle Festival is excited to introduce the 2022 Seagle Festival Emerging Artists. These 32 artists will be in residence at Seagle Festival for nine-weeks during our 107th Anniversary summer season. Here’s some interesting information about these talented young singers.
How were the artists chosen?
Every year, Seagle Festival’s General Director Tony Kostecki, and Artistic Director Darren Woods embark on a rigorous application and audition process to select the Seagle Festival emerging artists. For this cycle, the application process began November 1, 2021. All interested artists applied through an online service used by many opera companies across the country called YAP Tracker. YAP stands for Young Artist Program. The application gathers information like what experience they have, who their teachers are, where they go to school, and more. They also upload their professional resumes, headshots, and video recordings of themselves performing. The application also gathers some financial information to help inform what kind of scholarship they may need.
In a typical year, the application also allows them to request a live audition in one of several locations across the county where Tony and Darren travel to hear auditions in person. The video recordings serve as a screening tool since every year Seagle Festival has between 300-400 applicants, with only around 200 live audition times across the various locations, and only 32 selected for the summer. This year, because of the omicron variant, the Seagle Festival January 2022 live audition tour was unfortunately cancelled.
Because of the cancellation of the audition tour, Tony and Darren, along with Seagle Festival Director of Productions Richard Kagey, took several days to review all the submitted video recordings in lieu of the live auditions. While not the same as hearing these artists live, the advances in video technology over the past numbers of years thankfully allowed Darren, Tony and Richard enough information to narrow down the field to the 32 artists selected to participate this summer.
Do the singers know what parts they’ll sing before they arrive?
Yes. At Seagle Festival, we promise all our participating artists that they will be featured in at least one role during the course of the summer. Performing a role is an integral part of the artist training we offer, and one of the reasons so many incredible singers apply each year. While selecting the artists, Darren and Tony also cast all the shows for the summer. The roles given are part of the offer made to each singer when they are accepted to the program, along with any scholarship they are offered. Knowing all this information at once helps the artists make an informed decision of whether to accept the invitation to attend.
Where do the artists come from?
The 2022 Seagle Festival Artists come from all over the country, 18 different states to be exact, and this year, we even have one singer from Mexico. The most represented state this year is Texas with 5 of the 32 singers hailing from the Lone Star State. In second place is California with 4. Check out the map below, there is at least one 2022 artist from each of the green colored states on the map. Most of them are enrolled or recently graduated from a school of music in the United States. Some are still in undergraduate school, some in grad school, and some have already completed one or both degrees.
What makes Seagle Festival so appealing to young singers?
Seagle Festival is well known across the opera training world, in colleges and universities, as well as other opera companies, as a launching pad for some of the best vocal artists in the world of opera and musical theater. Our reputation for top-notch training, as well as the connections our leadership and staff have to the professional world make participation in the Seagle Festival program a major step in the careers of many artists.
How do I find out more about the artists?
You can find out where each artist is from, where they received their education, what roles they’ll be performing this summer and more, by going to our 2022 Artists page.
We hope you enjoyed this blog post. Stay tuned for more in coming months!
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