Drew Minter, biography

Drew Minter has been an internationally known countertenor for over two decades. He has sung leading roles in the opera houses of Brussels, Toulouse, Boston, Washington, Santa Fe, BAM, Wolf Trap, Glimmerglass, Nice, Marseille, as well as the Halle, Karlsruhe, and Goettingen Handel Festivals, among others. In 1995 he was asked to direct opera for the first time, Handel’s Radamisto at the Goettingen Festival. Since then, he has directed productions for the Boston Early Music Festival, Caramoor, St. Luke’s Orchestra, Opera Aperta, Lake George Opera, the Handel and Haydn Society, Tempesta di Mare, Apollo’s Fire, Boston University’s Opera Institute, Amherst Early Music Institute and a number of colleges and universities.

Drew gained recognition as a director of baroque operas, particularly the operas of Handel and Purcell. He began his own intensified studies of baroque stage movement and design. These led to frequent masterclasses in movement and interpretation with young singers. His work with the operas of Mozart began in fruitful collaborations over three seasons with Boston conductor Craig Smith. Together they led celebrated productions of two of Mozart’s collaborations with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, Cosi fan tutte and Don Giovanni. The Boston Herald lauded Drew’s updated Connecticut tennis-club rendition of the former as “delicious, clever, and detailed” and “a perfect match for ‘Cosi,” while The Boston Globe pronounced his a “smart, seductive Don Giovanni,” which “creates its own entirely persuasive world.” It was in the development of these two productions that Drew discovered the immediacy of presenting Mozart’s opera translated into well-sung English. The Globe’s Richard Dyer praised “Minter’s brilliant translation,” saying he was “more accurate than most translators; there are frequently appropriate touches of racy colloquialism…it was frankly a thrill to be in an audience that was responding to what was actually being sung, rather than to mistimed surtitles.”

Since then, Drew created and directed a successful production in his own translation of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, for the Five Colleges in Northampton, Massachusetts. The Five Colleges invited him back to direct Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortileges and his own translation of Caccini’s La Liberazione di Ruggiero, which was performed in January of 2006.

The Marriages of Mozart was created in the summer of 2004 for the Monadnock Festival at the Colonial Theatre in Keene, New Hampshire. Each act presents a shortened portrait from each of the three Mozart/Da Ponte collaborations, illustrating the creators’ brilliant observations on love and wedlock, and drawn from Drew’s earlier Mozart productions.

Drew is a graduate of Indiana University with high honors in Music and Languages and received a Diploma in Lieder and Oratario from the “Hochschule fuer Musik in Vienna.”

Drew has made over 50 recordings on Harmonia Mundi, Decaa/London, Newport Classics, Hungaroton and others. He appears in two films: as Tolomeo in Peter Sellars’s “Giulio Cesare,” and as the Devil in “In the Symphony of the World; a Portrait of Hildegard of Bingen.”

In addition to his continuing work as a singer and director, Drew teaches music full-time at Vassar College and writes regularly for Opera News.