by Lianne Coble-Dispensa

The closure of the Metropolitan Opera on March 12th, 2020 not only meant the cancellation of the last two months of the Met’s season. It also meant that dozens of seasoned Met Opera employees didn’t get their moment in the sun during the annual Metropolitan Opera Service Awards.

You may have never heard of the Service Awards because the yearly event is a private one for the Met Opera community. Those who are honored have reached career milestones of at least 20 years of service to the institution.  

The list of honorees this year was filled with artists whose collective achievements have helped the Met reach increasing levels of greatness during their tenure. Two beloved Met Chorus members, Kurt Phinney and Gloria Watson, had reached their 25th anniversary with the company, and were also on the list to be recognized for their accomplishments. Since they didn’t get to attend the ceremony this year, the Met Artists Newsletter decided to give them the recognition they deserve! (Though it’s still up to the Met to give them their watch as a gift for their 25 years of service…)

All About Kurt Phinney

If there’s one thing you can say about Kurt Phinney, it’s that he definitely didn’t sit around on his duff eating bonbons for the last 25 years in the Met Chorus. The job itself was extremely demanding from day one. “While the first 10 years posed the greatest challenge in terms of memorizing music,” Kurt said, “the job does not get much easier as one becomes more experienced.” Besides memorization of music and staging, as well as the usually grueling schedule of rehearsals and performances, preserving one’s high level of vocal quality is also an important focus, and maintaining a proper technique is paramount to longevity. “Navigating the Met’s relentless and highly demanding performance schedule with a maturing voice is arguably the biggest professional challenge choristers face.”

If that wasn’t enough, for the past 20 years, Kurt has held a 2nd job at the Met, that of Chorus Manager. As Chorus Manager, Kurt helps with scheduling music and staging rehearsals, oversees the regular and extra chorus payroll, and assists with the chorus budget preparation. He also participates in the chorus auditions, during which he hears hundreds of singers over the course of numerous audition dates during the season. And somehow, through all this, he also helped his wife Pamela raise three beautiful children.

Kurt credits his ability to juggle two taxing jobs to his partner-in-crime Stephen Paynter (another Met chorister with a second job, that of the Assistant Chorus Manager). “I could not have survived the pressure of these two jobs were it not for his kind, thoughtful, diligent, humorous and unfailingly ethical companionship in the office.”

Outside of the Met, Kurt does not seem to slow down. Once his kids went away to college, he was able to focus on the hobbies he loves: cycling, weightlifting, and writing. Writing, incidentally, isn’t just a passing interest in journaling. For the better part of a decade, Kurt has been writing a book “about the transition of classical music from the highly structured tonal language of the 19th century… to the largely unstructured post-tonal vocabulary of the 20th century.” His purpose for writing the book is “to chart a course back to the communally embraced language of tonality, jump-start the evolution of the standard repertoire, thereby restoring classical music as a fiscally viable and sustainable entertainment.”

This is all to say that after 25 years of service at the Met, there appears to be no stopping the unstoppable Kurt Phinney.

All About Gloria Watson

When current chorister-hopefuls audition for the Metropolitan Opera Chorus these days, they experience a rigorously organized process of the required application packet, a screening recording, followed by either a polite decline or an offer of a live audition (with a specific date and time). On the day of the audition, they are led through multiple checkpoints throughout the serpentine halls of the Met until they are called in to sing an aria or two (often less) for Maestro Donald Palumbo and a small panel of seasoned chorus members.

Mezzo-soprano Gloria Watson, however, auditioned in the glory days of the Met Opera Chorus “cattle call” process. An alum of the respected Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music (BM) and Indiana University (MM), Gloria “waited all day with 400 other singers” with varying levels of experience “in an excruciatingly long line,” she recalls, “and finally sang my audition in the late afternoon,” for then-Chorus Master Raymond Hughes. The rest, as they say, was history.

Gloria was thankful to have experienced the Metropolitan Opera at the height of the era of luxury casting. Her first show with the Met Chorus was I Pagliacci with none other than Pavarotti as Canio, Teresa Stratas as Nedda, and Juan Pons as Tonio. From then on, her career highlights included watching Renée Fleming sing “Ain’t It A Pretty Night,” from Susanna, Kiri Te Kanawa sing Amelia in Simon Boccanegra, and witnessing the nascent careers of Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Bryn Terfel, Anna Netrebko bloom into well-deserved stardom. She has the fondest of memories playing the role of the Page in the Otto Schenk production of Rigoletto in 1999. She performed the role eighteen times that year, including on Christmas eve, with her husband Dana (a trumpeter who toured with Frank Sinatra and Buddy Rich, as well as a carpenter/journeyman at the Metropolitan Opera) and her son Taylor in the audience. “I did it for them,” Gloria said. “Taylor didn’t think I was a real opera singer” until that moment!

Gloria is able to look back on her 25-year career at the Met with fondness and immense gratitude. “I was lucky enough to raise my children in good schools, with great health insurance and job security as a musician in America.” “It wasn’t always rosy,” she said, “but in the last month I was there, I remembered walking backstage thinking how great the Met is. I truly love the place, even though I’m a cranky old lady now!” She also treasures the memories made with her best friend, fellow Met chorister Rose Nencheck, who attended the Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music with Gloria. “Rose and I have been singing together in the alto section since we were 18 years old. It’s been quite a ride as best friends for 42 years!”

In the weeks before publication of this article, Gloria made the difficult but practical decision to retire. There were many reasons Gloria decided to choose this path. For one, the extended closure of the Met coupled with the uncertainty of reopening in the shadow of a second, serious wave of COVID cases was frightening to her, as well as Dana, considering both of them derive their income from their Met jobs. Facing the immense loss of income that is affecting all Met artists (and performing artists around the world), Gloria left “the greatest job in the world” so that she could collect her pension and help support her family. When the Met reopens, Dana will return to work, and we hope that Gloria stops by with him so we can shower her with the love and appreciation she deserves after 25 years of a job well done at the Met!

We also want to acknowledge two other members of the Met AGMA family who would have been celebrated at this year’s Service Awards:

Bass-baritone Bradley Garvin made his solo debut as the Second Prisoner in “Fidelio” in 1993, and went on to become a Plan Artist, assigned to both cover and perform countless roles over his 20 seasons at the Metropolitan Opera. In recent years, he went on for an ailing Gerald Finley to play the challenging role of Athanaël in Massenet’s “Thaïs”, to great acclaim. Brad is a welcoming, friendly face to all who come across him in the halls of the Met, and we’re fortunate to have had him on the team for all these years!

Stage Manager Gary Dietrich recently reached an incredible career milestone: 30 years at the Metropolitan Opera! He is known, and beloved by all, for his expertise, his cool, collected, respectful demeanor, and his incredible grace under fire (which is a necessary trait when working in the high-stress environment of the Met). We thank him, from the bottom of our hearts, for his unwavering commitment to his job, for the aura of Zen he exudes, and for putting in the work to ensure that all our Met productions can run smoothly and safely. To know Gary is to love him, and we’re so lucky he has called the Metropolitan Opera his home for all these years.

If you happen to see either of these gentlemen on the street (while social distancing, of course) or on the internet (via social media), please congratulate them for their incredible hard work and their many years of service!