Danielle Woerner: Singer

Photo by Michael Gold "One of the shining lights of New York's musical life" - New York Post

Praised for her charismatic and beautiful performances onstage, and her recordings that capture the essence of music of our time, Danielle enjoys a varied career as a soprano soloist that spans an impressively broad repertoire. It includes classical and operatic music from the middle ages through the 21st century; jazz, folk and world music; musical theater and cabaret. Her many New York City performances have been in venues ranging from La MaMa to Lincoln Center, including a recital debut at Merkin Concert Hall that was praised by The New York Times, and appearances at Carnegie (Weill) and CAMI Halls. She has been heard over National Public Radio, WAMC's Northeast Public Radio Network, WMHT-WRHV, and all of New York City's classical, public and university radio stations.

In staged works, Danielle has sung principal roles in operas and musical theater productions (Rigoletto, Carmen, Die Zauberfloete, Dido & Aeneas, Amahl and the Night Visitors, Gianni Schicchi, The Impresario, The Gypsy Baron, The Most Happy Fella, Follies, Into the Woods and more) with the Amato, Brooklyn Lyric and Delaware Valley Opera Companies, NYCA, the Gilbert & Sullivan Musical Theatre Company, and the Rhinebeck and Shandaken Theatrical Societies. The singer-actress received high marks for her realization of the role of student Sharon Graham in Terrence McNally's play Master Class, based on Maria Callas's master classes at Juilliard, in a May 2001 run of the Tony Award-winning play at Poughkeepsie's Cunneeen-Hackett Theater.

"A VERSATILE SOPRANO" [ headline ] "Danielle Woerner has the kind of voice that sends shivers down your spine with its trueness and variety. She's equally at home in opera, Gilbert and Sullivan, and concerts." -- Times Herald-Record, Middletown, NY.

While she sang Verdi’s Lady MacBeth in Master Class, she turned to more modern musical fare when she created the two leading female roles in Barbara Benary’s gamelan opera, Karna, which premiered in New York in 1994; took part in Pauline Oliveros’s Lunar Opera, commissioned by the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival (2000); and provided the vocals in Baikida Carroll musical score for Shakespeare’s King Lear at the Asolo Performing Arts Center in Sarasota, FL.

Danielle's work with living composers is a special calling. Several have written pieces expressly for her. She has given first performances of music by John Cage, Arsenio Girón, Philip Glass, Edith Gutierrez, Daron Hagen, Stefania de Kenessey, Otto Luening, Barry O'Neal, Robert Starer, Enrique Ubieta, and many others, including Beethoven's contemporary, Ferdinando Paer.

During her highly successful fall 2000 semester as Artist in Residence at Ulster County Community College in Stone Ridge, NY, Danielle gave a concert, "Voices of the Valley," that featured music of living Hudson Valley composers Robert Baksa, James Fitzwilliam, Aurora Northland, Richard Olsen, Peter Schickele, Alan Shulman and Robert Starer. Composer/pianists Schickele, Northland and Fitzwilliam accompanied her in their own pieces. That program, also performed on a new-music series at the Pleshakov Music Center in Hudson, NY, has been recorded in the studio for a new Voices of the Valley CD on Albany Records (Troy 877, released November 2006).

"WOERNER FILLS ARIAS WITH EMOTION" [ headline ] Photos by Michael Gold
"Treated her capacity audience to excerpts from operatic standards with all the aplomb of a staged performance...	[and] drew from the arias all the joy and pain that Monteverdi and Mozart created" – Times Herald-Record, Middletown, NY.

Early in her career, Danielle participated in several recordings by the NYC chamber chorus The Canby Singers (Telarc and RCA), and later in Leonard Bernstein’s live recording of the Mahler 3rd Symphony with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall. She is the voice of Margaret Reed, a principal role, on the 2003 original studio cast album of Forlorn Hope: The Donner Party Musical, by composer/lyricist Michael Bitterman. In 1999, her first full-length solo CD was issued on the Parnassus Records label (PACD 96012): She Walks in Beauty: Soprano Danielle Woerner Sings Chamber Music and Songs of Otto Luening and Robert Starer. The disk features supporting performances by pianists Robert Starer (his only commercially available recording as a performer) and Sylvia Buccelli, flutists Patricia Spencer and Marcia Gates, clarinetist Jean Kopperud, cellist Susan Seligman, and the Hudson Valley Philharmonic String Quartet.

Collaborations with Manhattan-based chamber groups have brought Danielle together with The Risorgimento Project (specializing in music of the Italian salon tradition), the Laurentian String Quartet, and new-music ensembles the Da Capo Chamber Players, Composers Concordance, Gamelan Son of Lion, and North-South-Consonance. In opera and oratorio/orchestra appearances, she's worked with conductors including Harold Farberman, Randall Craig Fleischer, Luis Garcia-Renart, Barbara Pickhardt, Harold Rosenbaum, Martin Rutishauser, Johannes Somary and Ignace Strasfogel. Standing ovations greeted concerts throughout Spain in July 2007, where she was featured as soloist on tour with Rosenbaum.

Photo by Michael Gold "A fresh, agile voice of ingratiating sweetness; artful singing, intelligent and idiomatic in several repertoires." - The New York Times (formal recital debut)

In the Hudson Valley, she's heard in return solo engagements with the Hudson Valley Philharmonic, Woodstock Chamber Orchestra, Ars Choralis, Camerata Chorale/Ulster Choral Society, SUNY New Paltz College-Community Chorus, Taghkanic Chorale and other ensembles. She has appeared on concert series including Maverick Concerts (Woodstock), the Grand Montgomery Chamber Music Series (Montgomery), the Hudson Valley BachFest (Cornwall), Lunch 'n' Listen (Poughkeepsie), Saugerties Pro Musica, and Concerts on the Hill (Hopewell). In October 2004, she and pianist-composer James Fitzwilliam gave a recital called “For Your Ears Only: Music for the Heart and Hearth,” on the inaugural season of the Trail Mix Music Festival in Olivebridge, NY; they frequently perform together on Hudson Valley recital series. The following summer, Danielle gave two celebrated performances at the Maverick Concert Hall of Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasilieras No.5, in its arrangement for soprano and eight cellos. It was among the many performances she's given that are consistently included in critics' year-end roundups of the year's best musical events in the Valley.

Far from being all seriousness, Danielle enjoys doing comedy with the likes of performance poet-musicians Mikhail Horowitz and Gilles Malkine. As one of the co-creator/performers of A Sixties Cabaret, she joins other cabaret, pop and rock musicians in an entertaining, enlightening look at a revolutionary decade. She writes her own songs, some of which mine a humorous vein. And she enjoyed playing three gongs at a time (sometimes while singing Balinese songs too) when she was part of the Balinese gong kebyar gamelan Giri Mekar, an Indonesian percussion orchestra founded by Steve Reich & Musicians drummer Garry Kvistad. “I miss the gamelan,” says Danielle, who had to give it up when evenings got too busy with rehearsals and teaching. “It was my musical meditation, sitting there inside my little cage of gongs. And I didn’t have to be perfect—just on time!”

SERVICES:

• SOLOIST and professional ensemble member for performances in opera, oratorio, and with orchestra

• CONCERT PROGRAMS -- Just a sampling of the options!
  • "For Your Ears Only: Music for the Heart and Hearth," a classical recital with pianist James Fitzwilliam, of songs written for intimate circumstances: living rooms, salons, cabaret. Wonderful for a small-to-medium-sized recital hall, school, or a Hauskonzert in your own "castle."

  • "A Sixties Cabaret" -- revisit the music of this decade of creativity and change, with vocalists Woerner, Jennie Litt, pianist David Alpher, percussionist Larry Balestra, and additional singers and instrumentalists, up to 7 performers. Not just the "greatest hits" predictably played on sixties-nostalgia radio channels, this show mines lots of little-known gems, as well as the best of the classics, interspersed with sparkling patter.

• HEAVENLY VOCALS for your weddings, parties, special events:

  Danielle will sing classical, jazz, popular or folk music with any combination of instruments your heart and pocketbook desire: string quartet, guitar, flute, harp, jazz combo, the organist at your wedding location. She'll organize the music for your event and contract players and additional singers. Theme programs are a specialty. Would you like a...

  Victorian wedding
  Medieval or Renaissance feast with music on period instruments
  Flower Child flashback
  All-French, Italian, or German musical theme
  Your Idea Here (We'll custom-create a musical program to suit).

• SING-ALONG PARTIES: Danielle will lead the music for a gathering of your song-loving friends in your own home. Pre-planning with you, coupled with a spontaneous approach at the party, allow the music to flow with the mood of the evening.