Performer Biography

Intelligence and color are the vocal hallmarks of singer/actor Jeremy Sortore, whose engaging song recitals, lively and thoughtful stage portrayals, and beauty of tone have garnered praise throughout the Denver metro area.

Trained primarily as a classical singer, Mr. Sortore nonetheless enjoys frequent forays into the world of musical theatre. Recent credits include Frog in A Year With Frog & Toad, the Balladeer and Lee Harvey Oswald in Assassins, the Padre in Man of La Mancha, the comic juvenile role in the Rodgers and Hammerstein revue A Grand Night for Singing and the dance role of Tommy Djilas in The Music Man.

In April of 2004, Boulder audiences heard Mr. Sortore sing the role of Peter Quint in CU Opera’s production of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw. Other tenor roles with CU Opera include the First Commissioner (Dialogues of the Carmelites) and the Sergeant (The Barber of Seville). Before his transition to the tenor repertoire, Mr. Sortore was a frequent portrayer of baritone character roles, including Papageno and Dr. Falke.

Equally at home on the concert stage, Mr. Sortore was invited in the spring of 2003 to sing in the finals of the Jennings Butterfield Young Artist Competition hosted by the Symphony of the West Valley in Sun City, Arizona. Mr. Sortore’s high degree of musicianship has afforded him the opportunity to concertize in both early and contemporary genres. In the summer of 2002, he appeared with the Colorado Music Festival in a performance of Monteverdi’s Venetian Vespers. At the other end of the stylistic spectrum, Mr. Sortore premiered composer Mitch Ohriner’s solo setting of children’s poetry from the holocaust, In Barbed Wire Things Can Bloom, as part of Holocaust Awareness Week in 2000.

Past choral experience has taken Mr. Sortore to some of the world’s premiere venues for choral music, including Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, Saint Mark’s in Venice, and numerous other churches and cathedrals throughout Italy, Austria, and Hungary. Mr. Sortore has performed as a member, as a ringer, and as a rehearsal-CD recording artist with choral ensembles ranging from the University of Colorado Choir to the Opera Colorado Chorus.

Mr. Sortore holds master’s and bachelor’s degrees in vocal performance and a minor in French from the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he was a two-time recipient of the Paula Marie and H. Rolan Zick Endowment, as well as the 2003-2004 recipient of the Wilma and Perry Louis Cunningham Scholarship in Voice, the Claudia Boettcher Merthan Vocal Scholarship and the Dennis Jackson Opera Scholarship. Other honors include the Gregory Philip Ranno Excellence in Music Scholarship, the Dante Alighieri Society of Denver Music Grant, the Howard B. Waltz Music Scholarship, the Wallace F. Fiske Academic Achievement Award in Music History, and the Wesley Yordon Prize for distinguished performance by a non-major in French and Italian. Mr. Sortore earned a Certificat de Langue Française from the Institut Français des Alpes in Annecy, France in 1999. He has participated in master classes with renowned vocal coach Martin Isepp (Metropolitan Opera, Glyndebourne Festival) and voice teachers Dan Marek (Mannes College of Music), Valorie Goodall (Rutgers University, retired), Darleen Kliewer-Britton (Arizona State University) and Scot Weir (Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler, Berlin).

Mr. Sortore has performed with the Arvada Center, the Aurora Fox, Next Stage, the Country Dinner Playhouse, CU Opera, CU Opera in the Summer, the Colorado Lyric Theatre Festival, the Rocky Mountain Center for Musical Arts, the Aurora Symphony, Lyric Artists of the West, the Colorado Music Festival, and the Opera Colorado Chorus.