Karis Tucker
Karis Tucker performs arias by Ethel Smyth and Benjamin Britten in the historic Glyndebourne Organ Room.
Karis plays Thurza in Festival 2022’s production of Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers. The opera takes place on the Cornish coast, where a remote community is living a precarious existence. Their only hope is the ships that are wrecked on their rocks. But when they start to cause those shipwrecks deliberately, it sets motion a sequence of events that end in tragedy.
Thurza is the young wife of elderly pastor Pasko. She and her lover Marc defy their community and light beacons to save the ships.
Here, Karis performs ‘Aimer c’est mourir’ and ‘Amour, tu es l’éclair’ from the opera.
For her third performance, Karis has chosen ‘Puppet, why so’ from Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
She is accompanied by Matthew Fletcher on piano.
You can enjoy more Organ Room Sessions on our YouTube channel.
Related links
from The wreckers
from The wreckers
from A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Britten
About the performers
The American mezzo-soprano is in her fourth season at Deutsche Oper Berlin where she joined the scholarship programme in the 2019-2020 season as winner of the 2019 Curt Engelhorn Scholarship awarded by the Opera Foundation in New York. Raised and educated in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, she completed her studies in the United States at the University of Cincinnati, College-Conservatory of Music under the tutelage of soprano Amy Johnson. In 2018 she was a Gerdine Young Artist at Opera Theatre of St. Louis, and in 2019 she was an Apprentice Artist at Des Moines Metro Opera. She continues to study voice with Romanian soprano Adina Nițescu. Taken from the Festival 2022 programme book.
Matthew has worked as a répétiteur at Glyndebourne since 2012, on a huge variety of repertoire, from Handel and Mozart to Strauss, Janáček and several world premieres. He works extensively as an accompanist and chamber musician and performs at prestigious venues and festivals throughout the UK and Europe. Matthew has performed as a pianist and harpsichordist with the LPO, RPO and OAE and his competition successes include the accompanist prizes at Das Lied in 2019 and the 2014 Kathleen Ferrier Awards. He read music at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and went on to study at the Royal Academy of Music, where he is now a vocal coach.