“Young Opera Singers Charm Island Audience”

Louisa Hufstader Wednesday, November 5, 2025 - 2:10pm
(The Vineyard Gazette)

Love, in all its guises, was in the air at the West Tisbury library Sunday afternoon.

“Today we’re celebrating all kinds of love: anguished love, frustrated love, love of nature, innocent love and fraternal love,” said pianist Diane Katzenberg Braun as she introduced the fall concert in her long-running Music Street series.

A longtime music educator who formerly collaborated with D’Anna Fortunato as a pianist and vocal coach in the famed mezzo-soprano’s studio, Katzenberg Braun works as an accompanist at New England Conservatory, where she finds the accomplished young musicians who perform in her Music Street concerts three times a year.

Her latest guests, soprano Josie Larsen and tenor Morgan Mastrangelo, are both rising soloists in the Boston Lyric Opera’s emerging artists program. Larsen holds a master’s degree from New England Conservatory and recently completed the conservatory’s two-year artist degree. Next year, she heads west to join the Ryan Opera Center at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Mastrangelo, who graduated from Northwestern University before earning his master’s at New England Conservatory, has performed as a soloist with Boston Baroque, Emmanuel Music and the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players, as well as with Boston Lyric and other U.S. opera and choral companies.

Diane Katzenberg Braun, seated at the piano, curates the Music Street series. — Jeanna Shepard

Their performances Sunday displayed all the vocal power and control you’d expect from grand opera singers, moderated just enough to suit the parlor atmosphere of the library’s community room.

Opening the show with Handel’s ringing, joyful Rejoice, from Messiah, Mastrangelo and Larsen also sang opera buffa in Mozart’s Fra Gli Amplessi, from Cosi Fan Tutte, and closed the concert with the Mario Lanza hit Be My Love, written by Nicholas Brodszky and Sammy Cahn.

Between duets, the singers alternated solo numbers, beginning with Mastrangelo’s open-hearted performance of selections from Dear Theo, a song cycle by contemporary composer Benjamin Moore based on letters between Vincent Van Gogh and his brother.

In a further tribute to Van Gogh, Larsen sang Debussy’s Nuit d’etoiles (Starry Night) and Sunflowers, by 20th-century composer Lori Laitman. She also performed two art songs set to Rachmaninoff’s Romances.

“My favorite language to sing in is Russian, [although] I am not Russian at all,” Larsen told the audience.

Liszt’s opera-inspired Pace Non Trovo (I Find No Peace), from a poem by the medieval scholar Petrarch, represented the “anguished” portion of the concert as

Mastrangelo portrayed the courtly lover’s despair with spellbinding intensity, and displayed Gilbert and Sullivan expertise on Oh, is there not one maiden breast, from Pirates of Penzance. Mastrangelo also time-traveled deep into the 20th century for Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat, from Guys and Dolls.

Larsen also delivered a Guys and Dolls solo, the comedic Adelaide’s Lament, complete with Betty Boop accent and a box of tissues for the character’s sneezes.

Another vocal music recital is coming up at the West Tisbury library at 3:30 p.m. Nov. 15, with soprano Molly Conole and pianist Lisa Weiss presenting Samuel Barber’s setting of texts by James Agee, Knoxville: Summer of 1915; André Previn’s I Want Magic, from the film A Streetcar Named Desire; John Kandor’s Letter from Sullivan Ballou and Island composer Phil Dietterich’s Bloomsday, with texts by James Joyce.

There’s also a jazz concert in the community room Nov. 9 at 2:30 p.m., with the Jeremy Berlin Trio and guest Lucas Ostinato paying tribute to Brazilian composers.