Adrienne Albert - Vocal Performer

Vocal Performer

Albert’s first professional work in music was as a mezzo-soprano soloist. She collaborated with Leonard Bernstein, Philip Glass, Gunther Schuller, and Igor Stravinsky among others. Her voice was preferred for parts written for pre-adolescent boys, and Igor Stravinsky is said to have referred to her as his “favorite boy alto”. Stravinsky’s fondness for the ambiguously gendered quality of her voice was such that he used Albert as the alto soloist in his Mass. Ms. Albert’s vocal career began while attending UCLA. While singing with The Gregg Smith Singers, she worked with the Maestro on many occasions and recorded three more solo recordings with him, including his “Four Russian Songs for Flute, Harp, Guitar, and Voice”, “Cantata”, and Stravinsky’s last original composition, “The Owl and the Pussycat”, with Robert Craft accompanying.

Ms. Albert enjoyed a long working relationship with Leonard Bernstein as a singer and contractor on his celebrated recordings of his “Mass” (the premiere of which opened the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC), and “West Side Story”, on which she contracted the Jets and Sharks, performing with Kiri Te Kanawa and Jose Carreras. She also sang with Barbara Hendricks at Bernstein’s 70th birthday celebration in Tanglewood under the baton of John Williams. Other solo recordings include songs of Charles Ives with The Columbia Symphony and Phillip Glass’ opera, “The Photographer”, with Glass conducting. At Avery Fisher Hall, she performed with Gunther Schuller and the New York Philharmonic in a premiere of Schuller’s “Symphonia for Four Voices and Orchestra”. As a studio singer in New York and Los Angeles, Ms. Albert performed on hundreds of television and radio commercials, sang on countless film scores, and worked with such diverse artists as Pablo Casals, Benny Golson, Dave Grusin, Leiber and Stoller, Zubin Mehta, Frank Sinatra, and Michael Tilson Thomas.