Neil Shicoff (Tenor)
Neil Shicoff (born June 2, 1949) is an American Jewish opera singer and
cantor known for his lyric tenor singing and his dramatic, emotional
acting.
Neil Shicoff was born in Brooklyn, New York. He studied at the
Juilliard School of Music, with his father, the hazzan Sidney Shicoff and
others, including Franco Corelli in the early 1980s. He sang in small theatres
in New York before music school, including a Don Jose in Bizet's Carmen at Amato
Opera and small roles at Juilliard, and was an apprentice at the Santa Fe Opera
in the summer of 1973. His professional debut as a tenor lead in a big opera
house was in the title role in Verdi's Ernani, conducted by James Levine in
Cincinnati in 1975.
In 1976, Shicoff made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera as Rinuccio in
Gianni Schicchi conducted by Levine. Shicoff was then engaged by the Met to sing
the tenor leads in Rigoletto, La Bohème, Der Rosenkavalier, and Werther, which
was to become one of his signature roles. He soon sang in the major opera houses
in the U.S. and Europe, winning great notices and recording some of his roles.
Shicoff experienced severe stage fright well into his career, which caused him
to cancel a number of performances. He was known to be a perfectionist,
carefully researching and preparing each role, both dramatically and
vocally.
In 1978, Shicoff married fellow Juilliard graduate, lyric soprano Judith
Haddon. After the death of his mother in 1984, Shicoff suffered emotional
problems, technical vocal difficulties and increasing performance anxiety. He
cancelled numerous performances, and by the end of the 1980s he had developed a
reputation for unreliability.
Shicoff continued singing at the Met for two years, but in 1991, he left
America, fleeing the stresses and headlines engendered by his ongoing divorce
proceeding and custody battle concerning his daughter, into a self-described
European exile. He lived for three years in Berlin, then Zürich, performing
throughout Europe (with a handful appearances in Buenos Aires), and he slowly
rebuilt his reputation for reliability. He appeared at Vienna State Opera, La
Scala, Paris Opera, Covent Garden, Berlin's Deutsche Oper, Bavarian State Opera,
Zurich Opera House and numerous other opera houses and concert halls throughout
Europe.
By 1997, Shicoff and Haddon finally reached a divorce settlement. Their final
decree left Shicoff free to marry soprano Dawn Kotoski, with whom he had lived
since 1990, and to renew his relationship with his daughter, Aliza. Shicoff also
returned to the Met, as Lensky in Eugene Onegin, to good notices. He has now
been heard in nearly 200 performances of 20 roles at the Met.
Due to his personal friendship with the Austrian Federal Chancellor, Alfred
Gusenbauer, Shicoff was widely expected to follow Ioan Holender as director of
the Vienna State Opera (Wiener Staatsoper) in 2010. In a surprise decision and
in defiance of Gusenbauer's publicly stated wish, Austrian Culture Minister
Claudia Schmidt, however, appointedDominique Meyer as director and Franz
Welser-Möst as musical director on June 6, 2007.
Shicoff's most famous roles (besides Werther), include the title roles in
Tales of Hoffman and Peter Grimes and Lensky in Eugene Onegin and Eleazar in La
Juive, as well as for a number of the Romantic French and Italian lyric and
spinto tenor roles. In addition to his opera performances, he has also sung
concerts with the Israel Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein, the Berlin
Philharmonic conducted by Claudio Abbado, the San Francisco Symphony conducted
by Edo de Waart, and the Boston Symphony Orchestraconducted by Seiji Ozawa,
among others, and at many festivals.
Shicoff has been Head of Opera at the Mikhailovsky Theatre of St. Petersburg,
Russia in 2015 – 2016.
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