California State University, Fresno

Campus: Home | Directories | Search

Sample Banner

Helene Joseph-Weil

Helene Joseph-Weil has performed in opera, concert, oratorio and solo recital in Italy, Austria, Germany, Yugoslavia, and throughout the United States. The mezzo-soprano's most recent international performances were as Artist-in-Residence for the Ascoli Piceno Music Festival in Ascoli Piceno, Italy, where she presented Lieder recitals accompanied by Italian pianist Andrea Dindo, as well as several contemporary works composed for her by California and British composers.

Joseph-Weil's long career as a solo singer have included concerts and operas with such notables as Erich Leinsdorf, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Julius Rudel, Rudolf Serkin, Claude Frank, Josef Wallnig, Andor Toth, and Bernard Paumgartner. She is on the RCA recording of Wagner's Lohengrin, conducted by Leinsdorf. Festival and symphonic solo appearances include being featured soloist with Boston Symphony, the Opera Society of Washington, D.C., the Chautauqua Opera Festival, The Tanglewood Festival, the Cabrillo Festival, the Santa Cruz Symphony, Chamber Music San Juans (WA), Scholar Opera, Highfield Theater (Falmouth, MA), the Salzburg Landestheater, the Fresno Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera Studio, and Scholar Opera. She has presented solo recitals in Munich, New York, Salzburg, the Vienna area, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco and throughout Silicon Valley and the California Central Valley. Her radio and television appearances include recitals broadcast in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, throughout Austria, as well as in the San Joaquin Valley and the San Francisco Bay areas.

Joseph-Weil's many opera roles have included all of the female roles in Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro, Cosi fan tutte and in Gay's The Beggar's Opera, Marenka (Bartered Bride), Saffi (Zigeunerbaron), Pamina (Die Zauberflote), Mimi and Musetta (La Boheme), Violetta (La Traviata), Zerlina and Donna Elvira (Don Giovanni), Marguerite and Siebel, (Faust), Flosshilde (Das Reingold), and the Marquise de Birkenfeld (La Fille du Regiment).

The mezzo-soprano is equally at home with contemporary music as she is with opera, art song and oratorio. She has premiered new works in New York and in San Francisco, including Roger Session's When Lilacs Last in the Door Yard Bloomed for UC-Berkeley. In addition, contemporary composers Sondra Rae Clark, Susan Owens Alexjander, and Alan Brett have each composed several groups of songs for the singer. In Fall of 1996, Joseph-Weil premiered Clark's Requiem for Lost Children and the mezzo-soprano and the composer are presently collaborating on an opera based on a Native-American theme.

Currently Helene Joseph-Weil is Professor of Music (Voice/Opera) at California State University Fresno, where she is the Vocal Area Coordinator and directs the Opera Theater. She was also the Founding Artistic Director of the Mozart Opera Studies Institute (MOSI). In the summer s of 1997, as Artist/Teacher-in-Residence at the Ascoli Piceno Music Festival in Ascoli, Piceno, Italy, she presented masterclasses on Schubert and Brahms Lieder. Her former academic appointments include Visiting Professor of Voice at the Hochschule fY¨r Musik "Mozarteum" in Salzburg, Austria, Stanford University, and the International Institute for Chamber Music in Munich Germany, where she taught German Diction and Vocal Technique in support of masterclasses with Elly Ameling and Walter Berry.

Helene Joseph-Weil is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music (BM) and San Jose State University (MA). She is a magna cum laude graduate of the Franz Schubert Institute in Baden, Austria, where she was a First Prize winner. She also studied voice and opera at the Hochschule Mozarteum in Salzburg and in New York City at the Metropolitan Opera. She took Italian language studies at Casa Italiana (Columbia University) and Lingua Due (Milan).

A winner of the Metropolitan Opera Great Lakes Regional competition, Joseph- Weil was also the 31st recipient of the Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship given through the University of Illinois. She was awarded additional scholarships for private studies in voice and opera in New York from the Metropolitan Opera and the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund. Her teachers have included Phyllis Curtin, Thelma Votipka, Louise Toth, Lislotte Egger, Donald Stenburg, Marie Gibson and Ellen Repp. She has taken Lieder and opera studies with Viorica Ursuleac, Hofrat Bernard Paumgartner, Jan Behr, Elly Ameling, Erik Werba, Hans Hotter, Walter Berry, Jorge Demus, Gerard Souzay, Wolfgang Niessner and Rudolf Jansen.

Joseph-Weil is a frequent guest speaker, adjudicator and panelist for the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of NATS (National Association of the Teachers of Singing). She also served as the Co-Director of the San Joaquin Valley District Met Opera auditions from 1990-1992. Her students, who have won numerous awards and competitions, including several First Place awards in the Metropolitan Opera District and Regional auditions, sing in opera houses and major touring companies in Europe and in the United States.

Helene Joseph-Weil is married to San Jose Symphony clarinetist Robert Weil. They have one daughter, Nadine Alexis, a management consultant with the firm of L.E.K./Alcar in Los Angeles.