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Alumnus Richard Harriman strikes gold with vocal discovery
Juan Diego Flórez, in a May Harriman-Jewell Series
concert at Kansas City’s Folly Theater |
The New York Times noted an historic event in its April 23 coverage of the opening of Donizetti’s “La Fille du Régiment” at the Metropolitan Opera: “After the tenor Juan Diego Flórez popped out his nine shining high C’s, the crowd rose and cheered. Mr. Flórez obliged with something not heard on the Met stage since 1994: a solo encore. It was one of those thrilling moments that opera impresarios live for.”
Dr. Richard Harriman ’53, William Jewell’s own impresario and founder of the Harriman-Jewell Series that bears his name, would no doubt agree with the Times’ assessment of the Flórez performance. Harriman has been following the Peruvian tenor’s career for years, and it was the Harriman-Jewell Series that presented the singer’s American recital debut in April of 2002.
“I had read the European reviews before Flórez performed at the Met,” Harriman recalled recently. “I contacted his manager in Europe, and we arranged to meet in New York to discuss the possibility of a recital.”
The agreed-upon meeting place for the January 2002 appointment was the café of the old Tower Records store just north of the Met’s home in New York’s Lincoln Center. The in-store café, as it turned out, had recently closed. So the negotiations took place among the bins of classical compact discs in the cavernous retail store. Harriman wanted to get a commitment for an American recital debut, but there were no slots available for the current season. When baritone Ben Heppner cancelled a performance due to illness, Harriman was ready with contract in hand to sign Flórez.
 Harriman-Jewell Series audiences responded ecstatically to the Flórez debut and to the tenor’s two subsequent Series performances. Harriman believes it is the singer’s vocal agility that leaves a lasting impression. “Plácido Domingo has said that Flórez is the greatest light tenor in history,” Harriman noted. “He is like no other voice today.”
Harriman recently traveled to Lima, Peru, to attend Flórez’s spring wedding to Julia Trappe. Not long after the wedding, Flórez began his headline-grabbing Met engagement.
“As a full house at the Met awaited the sporting event of the evening, Juan Diego Flórez....delivered his famous string of high C’s in Act I and then, repeating the whole thing, nailed them again,” wrote The New York Times’ classical music critic Bernard Holland. “The crowd, as they say, went wild.”
It had been 14 years since another tenor—Luciano Pavarotti—had enjoyed a similar reception after performing a solo encore during the third act of “Tosca” on the same stage in 1994. In a classic bit of “history-repeats-itself” symmetry, it was Harriman who presented the international recital debut of Pavarotti. The late tenor’s 1973 Jewell performance helped launch a career spanning more than three decades as the reigning superstar of the operatic world.
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