The 2018 Lotte Lenya Competition, took place at Kilbourn Hall at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY on April 14, 2018. This year’s competition brought the total distributed to young singers to more than $1 million in awards, prizes, and grants in the twenty-year history of the contest.
The judges—Tony Award-winning actress Victoria Clark, Encores! Artistic director Jack Viertel, UK conductor James Holmes—found the field of fifteen finalists so evenly matched that, after long deliberation, they decided to name three $15,000 winners and three $10,000 winners rather than the usual first, second, and third prizes. An additional $14,000 in discretionary awards was presented to four performers.
John Brancy (29, Mullica Hill, NJ), Caroline Hewitt (26, Houston, TX), and Eastman School of Music soprano Laura Corina Sanders (23, San Francisco, CA) each were awarded $15,000. Christian Hoff (25, Towson, MD), Reilly Nelson (28, Sault Ste. Marie, ON), and Philip Stoddard (26, Phoenix, AZ) took home $10,000 each. The three $15,000 winners impressed the judges with their vocal prowess, dramatic risk-taking, and canny choices of repertory. The $10,000 winners were recognized for their credibility of characterization, fluency with multiple languages, and idiomatic renditions of diverse repertory.
Discretionary awards in the amount of $3,500 were given to four singers for a notable aspect of their programs or performances. Christof Messner, 31 of Vienna, Austria, received the Carolyn Weber Award for outstanding creativity in the design of a diverse program and exceptional sensitivity to text/music relationships; Richard Glöckner, 23 of Salzburg, Austria, won a Lys Symonette Award ($3,500) for his imaginative presentation of “Bilbao Song” from Happy End. Gan-ya Ben-gur Akselrod, 30 of Tel Aviv, Israel, received a Lys Symonette Award for her riveting performance of “Lied der Lulu.” Nkrumah Gatling, 32 of Houston, TX, received the Marc Blitzstein Award for his moving rendition of “The Hills of Ixopo” from Lost in the Stars.
All other finalists—Christine Amon (31, Grand Rapids, MI), Daniel Berryman (27, New York, NY), Andrea Lett (27, Winnipeg, MB), Benjamin Pattison (27, Arlington, VA), and John Tibbetts (27, Tifton, GA)—received $2,000. Victoria Clark summarized the judges’ quandary in picking winners: “All of these young artists are already well on their way to varied careers.”
