Published Tuesday, September 10th, 2024
Featuring Thomas Gunther, baritone; Dr. Suna Gunther, soprano; and Shelly Armstrong, WSC staff accompanist on piano. (This event was postponed from Sept. 25.)
Wayne State College presents an evening of stories articulated through song at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 6, in Ley Theatre, located in the Brandenburg Building on campus. The guest recital features Dr. Suna Gunther, soprano; Thomas Gunther, baritone; and Shelly Armstrong, Wayne State’s staff accompanist on piano. (This event was postponed from Sept. 25.)
The performance is free and open to the public.
Embracing the theme “This is Us,” the singers perform solo and duet sets of operatic and musical theater repertoire. Suna performs music by Leonard Bernstein, Ned Rorem, Florence Price, and Kurt Weill. Thomas presents selections by George Butterworth, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Paul Bowles, and Richard Rogers. Duet repertoire includes Bernstein’s operatic parody “You were dead, you know” from “Candide,” Jason Robert Brown’s romantic “The Next Ten Minutes” from “The Last Five Years,” and “Dunque io son” from Gioachino Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia.”
Suna is an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Glenn Korff School of Music. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and a master’s degree and doctorate from the Jacobs School at the University of Indiana in Bloomington. Her recent roles have included Musetta in “La Bohème,” the Mother in “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” and two newly commissioned micro-operas by Rachel DeVore Fogarty and Forrest Pierce. She is an active stage and music director and the founder of Soo Opera's Summer Apprenticeship in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich.
Thomas serves as an adjunct professor at Doane University in Crete and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Glenn Korff School of Music. He earned degrees from Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. He has completed doctoral work at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. His favorite roles include the title role in “Sweeney Todd,” Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Marcello in “La Bohème,” Scarpia in “Tosca,” and many more.
For more information, contact the Wayne State Department of Music at 402-375-7359.