IMELDA FRANKLIN BOGUE
Contralto Imelda Franklin Bogue won the title of Metropolitan Opera Regional Finalist in her native Pacific Northwest and moved to the tristate area in 2006. She made her oratorio debut under the baton of Johannes Somary in 2007 and has since been rapidly emerging as a promising oratorio and concert artist with a special interest in sacred and baroque music. The Berkshire Review for the Arts recently praised her "true contralto voice . . . expressive, rich, yet clarion and bright in the upper registers". A sought-after concert and collaborative artist, Ms. Bogue has been the guest of the Fairfied County Chorale, Crescendo Berkshires, the Westchester Concert Singers, the Chappaqua Orchestra, and the Christendom College Fine Arts Program, and has also sung with the Seattle Academy of Baroque Opera and with the New York Continuo Collective at the Boston Early Music Fringe Festsival. She sings with the new baroque trio Laura's Harp, founded by Johanna Marie Rose of the early music supergroupAnonymous 4, which makes its debut with Music Mondays with Doug Drake in New York City in October, and returns to sing a Zelenka mass setting with Crescendo Berkshires in November of 2010. A strong supporter of new music, Ms. Bogue premiered a new contralto art song cycle on texts of Gerard Manly Hopkins composed by Dr. Kurt Poterack for the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Christendom College, and began developing The Life of Christ in Song in 2008. She converted to Catholicism at the age of fifteen after singing a Mass setting by Michael Haydn, and thinks that sacred music rocks.
