Deborah P. Massell
Associate Professor: Voice
DEBORAH MASSELL, Soprano, holds over four decades' experience in vocal performance in Europe and North America. She has appeared in leading roles such as Pamina, Susanna, Despina, Sophie, Zerlina, Servilia, Semele, Bastienne, Euridice, and Belinda, as well as several world premieres, and performed as soloist in a great number of concerts, oratorios, recitals, and chamber music, including in many works composed especially for her voice.
She has sung in acclaimed opera houses such as the Hamburg State Opera under General Director Rolf Liebermann, Theater Basel, the Gärtnerplatz Theater and the Salzburg Mozarteum, as well as the Vienna, Schleswig-Holstein, Gmunden, St. Bart's, Mostly Mozart, Recklinghausen, Princeton, and Caramoor Festivals. She has performed in concert venues such as the United Nations, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Town Hall, as well as in many museums, churches and university concert halls across the United States and Europe. She has also worked as soprano soloist sailing the Mediterranean visiting twenty-one countries while singing opera, chamber music art song, and musical theater on the Cunard Cruise Line. She has worked with noted conductors including Julius Rudel, Stefan Soltesz, Klauspeter Seibel, Niksa Bareza, Gerard Schwarz, Lukas Foss, Hans Zender, Michel Corboz, René Jacobs, Thierry Fischer, Kenneth Cooper, and Will Crutchfield, and stage directors Peter Ustinov, Herbert Wernicke, and John Neumeier. Orchestral collaborations include the Ensemble Vocal & Instrumental de Lausanne, Orchestra of St. Luke's, North German Radio Orchestra, Hamburg State Orchestra, Orchestre de Genève, Dortmund Musikverein, Syracuse Orchestra, the Mid-Atlantic Chamber Orchestra, and the Orchestra of Northern NY. In recital she has been heard with artists such as Warren Jones, Walter Berry, Brian Zeger, Eugene Asti, Emile Naoumoff, Paul Wyse, and François Germain, and has had intensive study in Art Song and operatic vocal literature with the legendary Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Gèrard Souzay, Dalton Baldwin, Lazlo Halasz, Hugues Cuènod, Nico Castel, Frank Corsaro, Camilla Williams, Judith Raskin, Lucy Shelton, Peter Serkin, Pierre Vallet, and Rosemarie Landry. In master classes she has sung for, among others, Nicolai Gedda, Giorgio Tozzi, and Maureen Forrester.
She has performed educational programs of operatic arias and scenes for families through the Metropolitan Opera Guild, the Children's Free Opera of New York (Orchestra of St. Luke's), the Orchestra of Northern New York, and the Mexico City Opera. Ms Massell has also performed on the video Ears Wide Open, an introduction to classical music for children.
In addition to recording for Austrian, German, and Swiss radio, her discography includes Gluck's Echo et Narcisse (CD and video), the songs of Jacques Leguerney with Kurt Ollmann and Mary Dibbern in close collaboration with the composer, (both for Harmonia Mundi), and the award-winning video The Bald Soprano with the Center for Contemporary Opera in NYC.
Dr. Massell has been on the faculty of The Crane School of Music since 2000. In addition to teaching voice and diction classes at Crane, she co-directs the Nanjing International Summer Vocal Program with her Chinese colleague, Professor Zhou Jie, and has taught at Hunter College and the Miami University Frost School of Music Summer Program in Salzburg. She has taught workshops in Preparing a Successful College Audition throughout New York State and has taught poetry, English, drama, and music students in several artist residencies at Hamilton College. She is a contributor to the online diction resource "The Diction Police" as an International Phonetic Alphabet transcriber for German and Italian repertoire, as well as editing their online diction books Chantez ! An Interactive Handbook of French Diction for Singers and Sing mal! An Interactive Handbook of German Diction for Singers. A longtime member of the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS), Massell was chosen for the 2003 NATS Intern Program in their acclaimed voice teaching internship, as well as having served on the board of the NATS Central NY Fingerlakes Chapter. She holds a B.A. degree with Honors in Music from Hamilton College, a Master's degree from The Mannes College of Music, and a Doctorate from the Université de Montréal, where the focus of her thesis was the French composer, Lili Boulanger.
Students from Dr. Massell's studio are working as skilled and beloved music teachers in public and private schools all over the United States and have taught at the Crane School of Music as Guest Adjunct Professors; as operatic performers, they have worked at the Metropolitan Opera, Utah Opera, Arizona Opera, Colorado Opera, Portland Opera, Lincoln Center Theater, and in Germany at the Opernhaus Wuppertal, Landestheater Detmold, Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden, and Theater Kiel; Musical Theater performers are featured as vocal and dance leads in regional theater and national Broadway tours; students have attended prestigious Young Artist Programs such as Chicago Lyric Opera, San Francisco Merola Opera Program, Santa Fe Opera, Arizona Opera, Pittsburgh Festival Opera, Utah Opera, Colorado Opera, Saratoga Opera, Tanglewood Music Center, Glimmerglass Opera, Seagle Music Colony, Ohio Light Opera and College Light Opera Company; they have attended graduate programs at The Juilliard School, University of Southern CA, Indiana University, Manhattan School of Music, Mannes College of Music, Cleveland Institute of Music, New England Conservatory of Music, Bard College, Boston University, Penn State University, Westminster Choir College, McGill University, Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg, and Hochschule für Musik Hans Eisler Berlin; awards include district, regional, and semi-finalists of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions (now the Laffont Competition), First Place George London Foundation, First Place Mildred Miller International Competition, First Prize Partners for the Arts Competition, Quarter Finals of the Monte Carlo Voice Masters Competition, and First Place in many NATS Student Competitions. Alumni from her studio have won the 2022, 2023, and 2024 SUNY Potsdam Rising Star Award.
Dr. Massell is a fervent supporter of non-profit organizations at the local level. Her belief in animal rescue and welfare led her to serve on the boards of the Potsdam Humane Society and the Potsdam Community Dog Park (an entity she helped found). She has been the coordinator, host, and liaison for the Metropolitan Opera: Live in HD broadcasts shown at the Potsdam Roxy Theater from 2008-2022, and won a SUNY Potsdam President's Award for her work on this project as well as for the Dog Park. As an advocate for local, organic, and fair-trade food, she has served on the board of the Potsdam Food Co-op. While supporting community arts programs she became a board member with the St. Lawrence County Arts Council and has volunteered through the Crane Opera Ensemble's Educational Outreach Program. She offers a "Workshop in Vocal Performance: A Window into One Crane Studio" yearly on SUNY Potsdam's Family Weekend; She has also served on the Service Learning and Sustainability Task Forces, and brings her studio to sing for hospitals and nursing homes throughout the community. She is the Faculty Advisor for the Crane Opera Club and a member of the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging Task Force. In her time off, she can be found walking her dog, Shika, all over the beautiful North Country.