Soprano Julie Reumert came to this country for the music; she stayed for the city. And once she found Tribeca, she knew she wasn’t going back.
The opera singer, who arrived here from Denmark in 2009 to go to the Manhattan School of Music, performs regularly and is also on the teaching staff of New York Vocal Coaching. She has a (nearly sold out) solo concert coming up on Friday, Nov. 8, at Carnegie Hall, where she will perform with her regular pianist Andrew King as well as an all-female string quartet and a harpist.
And as opera singers do, Reumert will perform in several languages. She will be singing in her native Danish — a song cycle by the composer Carl Nielsen — as well as Latin, English, French and German. There’s a song cycle by Gustav Mahler and Gabriel Fauré as well as Maurice Ravel, Antonio Vivaldi and Franz Schubert on the program.
So to the local angle: Reumert met her husband at Yoga Vida; they had their first date at The Roxy; they moved in together at Truffles Tribeca then Gateway; were married at City Hall and had their reception at the upstairs room at Tribeca Grill. Reumert also sings with Downtown Voices out of Trinity. And she even bumped into her ENT (a singer’s guru) — Michael Pitman — while jogging in Hudson River Park; turns out he lives in Tribeca too.
She practices for an hour and a half every day except Sundays, when she tries to give her body – and her mind — a rest from singing. The performance business can be all-consuming, but while she used to have to manage some nerves, as she has matured as a singer, those have faded and been replaced with what I would call zeal.
“I go into this tunnel-like focus,” she said. “It’s almost a sacred place where nothing can get in – no guy, no problem, no anything. Now I just can’t wait to get on stage – I just can’t wait to share it.”