Eugene weekly., June 20, 2013, Page 39, Image 39

Phantastic
Voyage
BY BRETT CAMPBELL
TENOR NICHOLAS
PHAN EXPLORES
OREGON AND
BRITTEN
O
n Valentine’s Day in 2009, the young opera singer Nicholas Phan
was standing in his New York kitchen when the phone rang. His
manager was calling to tell him that a colleague had just canceled
his performance, which Helmuth Rilling was leading that night at
Carnegie Hall. Could Phan fi ll in? Well, he replied, he had sung
the role in Haydn’s mighty oratorio The Creation before — but it
was eight years ago, and he’d sung it only in English. That night’s
performance was to be in German. Nevertheless, he grabbed his score and agreed to give
it a shot. A few hours later, he was at Carnegie, auditioning for Rilling. Expecting to sing
only a single aria, he wound up singing through the entire score. “That audition turned out
to be our rehearsal,” Phan recalls. Rilling hired him on the spot, and three hours later, he
was walking onstage at Carnegie Hall to sing with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s.
It was a breakthrough moment for Phan. “I’d never done anything like that,” he says. “I
didn’t know I could perform under pressure.” He must have done well — Rilling has been
calling his number ever since, including a last minute fi ll in (on a relatively leisurely two-
week notice) at last year’s Oregon Bach Festival.
The spotlight at this year’s Bach Festival will deservedly fall primarily on retiring
founding music director Rilling, who has contributed so much to Oregon music over the
past 40-plus years. But Phan will be almost as prominent, headlining in Beethoven’s Missa
Solemnis, Bach’s B Minor Mass and St. John Passion, Mendelssohn’s Psalm 95, and a
concert of vocal chamber music.
Still safely under age 35, Phan is one of the hottest singers in classical music, and
the variety of his OBF appearances mirror the unusual diversity of his still young career.
A rare rising star in both the concert and opera worlds, Phan appeared with most of the
country’s top orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony and
San Francisco Symphony, recorded four albums and worked with conductors as diverse
as British period instrument specialists Harry Bicket and Nicholas McGegan and arch-
modernist Pierre Boulez. And he’s performed with some of the world’s leading opera
companies, including Seattle, LA, Houston, New York City and Frankfurt.
Amid all his peregrinations, Phan has a special affi nity for Oregon. Phan recently
blogged (wkly.ws/1i0) about his love for the city of Portland and its coffee, laid-back
atmosphere and natural beauty. “I have a real fondness for Oregon,” he says. “The state is
beautiful, and I love the coffee, the wine, the food and the people.”
The feeling is mutual, because along with his OBF appearances, Phan has been invited
to appear for the second straight summer at Portland’s annual summer Chamber Music
Northwest festival. That’s on top of his May appearances with Portland Opera, where last
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