Joshua Hopkins

2003 Winner of the Brian Law Opera Scholarship Competition

From the program notes to the Reception with Gerald Finley, held 21 September 2006:

Winner of the 2006 Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award, Joshua Hopkins has been hailed as “…an outstanding young baritone with a virile, vigorous yet velvety sound and an immediately evident dramatic authority.” Operatic performances of the 2006-07 season bring the Canadian baritone to Opera Carolina for his debut with the company in a double-bill of Pagliacci and La Vida Breve as well as back to L’Opéra de Montréal for Don Giovani. In concert he joins Hans Graf and the Houston Symphony for Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem, Bernard Labadie and Ensemble Arion for Bach’s St. John Passion, and both the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra and Edmonton Symphony Orchestra in Handel’s Messiah. Joshua presents a North American recital tour with performances in New York at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Hall, in Vancouver, Montreal, and in Sanibel, Florida, the latter under the auspices of the Marilyn Horne Foundation.

Operatic performances of the past season included Morales in Carmen for the Canadian Opera Company, Publio in La Clemenza di Tito at L’Opéra de Montréal, and Papageno in Die Zauberflöte, both at Calgary Opera and the Santa Fe Opera. On the concert stage, Joshua offered a program of Bach Cantatas with Bernard Labadie and the Ensemble Arion in Quebec and Montreal, joined Barbara Bonney for performances of songs by three generations of Mozart (Leopold, Wolfgang Amadeus, and Franz Xaver) under the auspices of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and appeared at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall in a performance of Haydn part songs with pianist Richard Goode. For the Marilyn Horne Foundation, he offered a recital and an educational residency at the University of Pittsburgh and also appeared in Toronto, in conjunction with The Aldeburgh Connection, in a program entitled “Schubert’s Florilegium,” highlighting many of the Lieder about flowers written by the composer.

Completing his training as a member of the Houston Grand Opera Studio in the spring of 2005, Joshua’s performances of the past season with the company included the role of The Pilot in The Little Prince and Sharpless in Madama Butterfly. He also performed Count Almaviva in Le Nozze di Figaro at Opera Pacific, Silvio in I Pagliacci at the Amarillo Opera, offered a New York recital presented by the George London Foundation for Singers, and gave the world premiere of Michael Tilson Thomas’ Rilke Songs at Zankel Hall in New York.

Past opera engagements include Pollux in Rameau’s Castor et Pollux with Opera in Concert, recorded and released by the NAXOS label, Figaro in Le nozze di Figaro and Guglielmo in Così fan tutte with Opera McGill, and, as a member of Glimmerglass Opera’s Young American Artist Program, the role of Friedrich Bhaer in Little Women. Of these performances, the New Yorker hailed his voice as “…a honey-toned, unforced baritone” and The Globe and Mail wrote, “Hopkins has a robust voice that is filled with personality, subtle yet strong at the same time.”

He has appeared in concert with the symphonies of Baltimore, Edmonton, Houston, Montreal, and Quebec and with L’Orchestre Métropolitain, Les Violons du Roy, and the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa. He has performed an extensive range of J.S. Bach’s works, including his Christmas Oratorio, Magnificat, Mass in B Minor, St. John Passion and St. Matthew Passion. Joshua also has been featured in Fauré’s Requiem, Bruckner’s Te Deum, Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle, and Handel’s Messiah.

A Carnegie Hall debut at Weill Recital Hall in January 2004 was made possible by the Marilyn Horne Foundation. Joshua has recorded three recitals with CBC Radio’s Jeunes Artistes program, performed Schubert’s Die Winterreise in Montreal and in Burlington, Vermont, for which he was awarded an FCAR Master’s Research Grant, and he was joined by pianist Graham Johnson for a series of recitals surveying the repertoire of composers from A to Z in a presentation with the Vancouver Recital Society.

Joshua Hopkins was a prize winner in the 2005 Plácido Domingo Operalia Competition held in Madrid, a National Semi-Finalist in the Metropolitan Opera’s 2003 National Council Auditions and, in September of 2002, José Carreras presented him with the first place prize in the Julián Gayarre International Singing Competition. Most recently (September 2006), Joshua was the second-place winner in the category Voice (Opera) in the ARD Music Competition in Munich—Germany’s premier international competition.