The Pennington United Methodist Church continues its year-long celebration of the 250th Anniversary of Methodism in its community with a concert recital featuring Emily Newton, a renowned European opera singer and a close family friend of one of the church’s members. In 2016, she gave a concert there at the behest of her friend, honoring the community and the church.
Emily Newton returns to Pennington UMC on Saturday, September 14 at 3pm with pianist Joshua Rupley, a fellow colleague at the University of Augsburg, Germany. The recital will benefit the church’s many mission projects with a free will offering. A reception for Newton and Rupley will follow the recital. All are welcome!
Newton grew up along the rural Texas coast. Later, she studied jazz arranging and aspired to be a jazz singer. However, after hearing her voice, her professors at North Texas State University soon convinced her to sing opera instead, and she has never looked back.
When the American soprano sang a Mozart operatic role with the New Jersey Opera Theater in Princeton years ago, her name was not widely known. But she certainly created a sensation in Germany when she starred in continental Europe’s premiere of the opera Anna Nicole. She is now very much a household name in her adopted city where she is a member of the city’s Nuremberg State Theater. The South German News enthused, “She sings and plays with a truth that is absolutely fascinating, and you can feel this in every nuance of Newton’s performance. Her Marschallin is a woman of today, and she imbues her with lyricism and drama, and a seemingly effortlessly produced vocal elegance.”
Emily Newton has covered lead Wagnerian roles for New York’s Metropolitan Opera and Germany’s Bayreuth Festival, and has sung major roles at Vienna State Opera, Glimmerglass Opera, Lisbon’s Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, Opera New Jersey, and Opera in the Heights, just to name-drop a few venues. And on the concert stage, she has performed soprano solos in Verdi’s Requiem, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, Brahms’ Requiem, and Mendelson’s Elijah, and was a winner of the New York District Metropolitan Opera Competition in 2006.
Pursuing her interest in helping the next generations of singers, Newton also teaches voice at the University of Augsburg. She has given workshops and master classes to students at Boston University, University of Miami, Rice University, SUNY Fredonia, and the American Institute of Musical Studies in Graz, Austria.
“I truly love sharing all kinds of music with others,” says Newton. Indeed she does, as critics from the Wall Street Journal, Newark Star-Ledger, Houston Chronicle, and the Trenton Times can attest. She has been described as “a real beauty, an absolute revelation … a true Verdian dramatic soprano with effortless power, control and radiant tone.”
For more information, please visit Pennington UMC website.
