Barbara Shuttleworth

Shuttleworth, Barbara

Barbara Shuttleworth. Soprano, b Toronto 18 Apr ca 1944; B MUS (Juilliard) 1970. She made her debut at five on the CBC radio program 'Small Types Club' and was heard regularly in that series for the next eight years. She studied piano with John Coveart and Helen Wilson at the RCMT and voice with Judith Litante in California. At Juilliard 1965-70 she studied with Suzanne Bloch (theory and harmony) and Jennie Tourel and Beverly Johnson (voice). While a member of the Juilliard Opera Theater she sang in productions of Harold Farberman's The Losers, Richard Rodney Bennett's The Mines of Sulphur, and Poulenc's La Voix humaine. She has been a member of the New York Chamber Soloists, and she joined the New York City Opera in 1971. Among her roles with that company have been Kristina in Janáček's The Makropoulos Affair, Clorinda in Rossini's La Cenerentola, and Miss Jessel in Britten's The Turn of the Screw. (She repeated the last-named role with the NACO in concert performances in Ottawa and Toronto in 1975.) With the Santa Fe Opera she sang Nellie in Lee Hoiby's Summer and Smoke and the soprano lead in the premiere of Luciano Berio's Opera. She also has appeared with the Baltimore Opera, the Vancouver and Edmonton Operas, and the Welsh National Opera, and she made her COC debut in 1976 as Musetta in La Bohème. Other COC roles include Wanda in The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein and Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro. She has sung at the Newport (Rhode Island) Music Festival and at the Wexford Festival in Ireland. In 1972 she was Lisette in a CBC TV production of Puccini's La Rondine. She made her New York Philharmonic debut in March 1973 in a performance of Haydn's L'Incontro Improviso conducted by Pierre Boulez. In 1980 she sang in The Mikado for the Southern Alberta Opera Association (Calgary Opera) and in 1981 she was Queen Roxana in the Opera Theatre of St Louis production of Szymanowski's King Roger, its US premiere, and sang in the COC The Merry Widow..

Barbara Shuttleworth's father was the dance-band leader Bob Shuttleworth (d Los Angeles 13 Dec 1989). Her mother, the soprano Frosia Gregory (b Toronto 11 May 1922, d there 26 Jun 1983; a pupil, at the Juilliard School, of Anna E. Schoen-René), sang on various CBC radio shows during the 1940s and 1950s and was host for the children's show 'Frosia Tells a Story' (1950) and the TV program 'A Date with Frosia' (1954). She also appeared in Spring Thaw. She was known especially for her folksong performances, in which she sang and played the autoharp.