Soprano Amanda Forsythe voices her love of opera

By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff | December 31, 2004

Boston Baroque, Martin Pearlman, Music Director.
Photo: Julian Bullitt

Soprano Amanda Forsythe has sung so often with baritone David Kravitz that she was only mildly surprised recently when she Googled her name, and up popped a reference to "Amanda Kravitz."

Tonight and tomorrow afternoon, Forsythe is paired with Kravitz again for Pergolesi's delicious little opera "La Serva Padrona" ("The Maid as Mistress"), presented by Boston Baroque as part of its annual New Year's Eve/New Year's Day gala at Sanders Theatre.

In the opera, the spirited servant girl Serpina tricks her boss Uberto into marrying her. As it happens, Forsythe is busy planning her own wedding this summer — but not to Kravitz. Her fiance is Edward Elwyn Jones, the new university organist and choirmaster at Harvard.

The soprano, who is in her 20s but is pointedly vague about just which birthday she has passed, arrived in Boston a few years ago as a graduate student at New England Conservatory. Her star had been conspicuously rising ever since. Martin Pearlman, artistic director of Boston Baroque, gave her her first professional break in 2001 and has repeatedly re-engaged her; she has also sung with Emmanuel Music and the Handel & Haydn Society.

Forsythe was elegant, poised, focused, and determined as she talked recently about her emerging career. She grew up on Roosevelt Island, alongside Manhattan, and sang in high school choirs without ever taking her vocal potential very seriously.

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