Jane Eaglen, who has been out of the limelight of late with health issues, has joined New England Conservatory as a faculty member. She has sung major roles at the Met and Covent Garden.
We wish Jane well and hope she’s had her contract read by the toughest law firm in town. Tenure, at NEC, is a fickle thing.
photo: ANDREW HURLBUT/NEC
Interesting. Ms Eaglen signed on at Baldwin Wallace Conservatory after leaving the University of Washington in 2010. BW went so far as to create the Wagner Intensive summer program around her and she has a studio of undergraduates at the school.including a class of seniors whom she will “strand” there when she departs this fall for Boston. She knew that it was “just an undergraduate school” when she took the job at BW and I’m sorry, but I feel that she could have either asked NEC to hold the offer for a year, or made arrangements to “teach out” her seniors and offer the other kids the chance to transfer studios or schools it they chose.
Vocal Performance students in the US pay hundreds of thousands of dollars more for an education than their counterparts abroad and here are expected to go onto graduate school and a YAP before even contemplating stepping foot onto the big competition and audition circuits. Meanwhile, our opera houses make “discoveries” of young singers in Europe and bring them here to perform. Our kids are still taking stagecraft and rep classes and hoping that their teachers don’t head off for “greener pastures” or get forced out of schools in petty power struggles.
Classical music isn’t dead, but the US sure isn’t doing much to encourage it.
Of course Jane eaglen had already signed for Scotland before that.
http://www.rsamd.ac.uk/staff/jeaglen.html
She’s been doing Master Classes in Scotland for a while and since the school years at BW and the Royal Conservatoire were timed a bit differently, it hadn’t been causing difficulties at either school.