Students of Thomas Harper and Carrie Shaw perform art songs and arias in a variety of languages and styles. Program includes works by Samuel Barber, Camille Saint-Saëns, Vincenzo Bellini, Franz Schubert, and others.
DIRECTOR BIOS
Thomas Harper is Associate Professor of Voice at the University of Washington. In addition to voice instruction, he holds classes in Diction and Art-Song Repertoire.
He has performed for three decades in opera houses and concert halls in Europe and the Americas, including Deutsche Oper Berlin, Hamburgische Staatsoper, Grand Théâtre de Genève, RAI Torino, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Dallas Opera, Seattle Opera, Téatro Municipal de Santiago, Chile, and many others. He has amassed a wide and varied repertoire of over fifty roles including the “Duke” in Rigoletto, “Rodolfo” in La Bohème, “Radames” in Aida, “Canio” in I Pagliacci, “Eléazar” in La Juive, “Florestan” in Fidelio, “Erik” in Der Fliegende Holländer, “Parsifal” in Parsifal, “Alwa” in Alban Berg’s Lulu, “Gregor” in Leoš Janá?ek’s Makropoulos Affair and “Mime” in Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, which he also recorded on the Arte Nova label. He has won enthusiastic praise for the role of “Fritz” on the Naxos recording of Franz Schreker’s opera Der Ferne Klang and for his definitive interpretation of “Mime” in Der Ring des Nibelungen in numerous European and American opera houses. He may also be heard on the Naxos label singing Famous Tenor Arias from the Italian repertoire as well as Gustav Mahler’s Lied von der Erde with the Irish National Orchestra.
Carrie Henneman Shaw joined the Voice Program as an artist in residence in Autumn 2020. As a singer, Carrie engages in a wide variety of musical projects, but she focuses on early and contemporary music. In 2023, she was awarded a Royalty Research Fund grant to research and record experiments in vocal timbre with composer Mauricio Pauly and pianist Mabel Kwan. In 2024, she was awarded the Donald E. Petersen Endowed Faculty Fellowship for Excellence.
A sample of her work includes an upcoming solo recording on Naxos Records of early 18th-century French song; creating music for a live-music-for-dance project with James Sewell Ballet; and collaborating on a recording with the band Deerhoof. Carrie is a two-time winner of a McKnight Fellowship for Performing Musicians, and she is a member of two groups that focus on music by living composers, Ensemble Dal Niente, a mixed chamber collective, and Quince Ensemble, a treble voice quartet.
She appears in numerous recordings ranging from medieval sacred music to a video-game soundtrack, and before coming to the UW, she has been maintaining a full university studio for the six years and participating in educational residencies for composers and performers around the country, including UC-Berkeley, Stanford, New York University, the University of Chicago, and beyond.