Kevin Ray has been surrounded by music his whole life. His parents were professional singers with the West Point Band. In elementary school he began playing the saxophone and piano. It wasn’t until he appeared in middle school plays that he realized he had a talent for singing. Since graduating from Cornwall in 2003, Ray has made a career as an opera singer.
To foster his talent at a young age, Ray began taking voice lessons in New York City as an eighth grader. By his junior year of high school, he was attending Julliard Pre-College and singing in high school musicals such as “West Side Story” and “Footloose.”
“Because I was around my musician family, they knew what direction to push me in,” said Ray.
Ray’s teacher at Julliard began pushing the young vocalist to look into music schools so he settled on Oberlin College where he majored in voice performance and earned a bachelor’s degree in music.
“I didn’t really know what I wanted to do,” Ray said. “It was pretty clear by the time I was 16 or 17 that I was further ahead than my colleagues in singing than in anything else. I was good at saxophone, but certainly not good enough to have a professional career, so I decided to focus on singing. Opera pretty quickly became the main focus. Acting wasn’t as big as working on singing once I got into opera classes. It became pretty obvious the most successful singers got into singing opera and singing on stage.”
After graduating from Oberlin, Ray spent the next five years at the Curtis Institute earning his master’s degree in opera.
As an opera singer, Ray has studied a number of foreign languages, but one doesn’t have to be proficient in a language to be able to perform.
Ray used to spend days translating whole operas, but with more than 10 years of experience, he’s able to get a good sense of what’s going on without having to open up a dictionary.
After completing his master’s degree, Ray was hired by the Houston Grand Opera as a part of their young artists’ program.
“It was intended for young singers to develop their abilities in a post-graduate sense. For the first time I was making a living as a singer. That was something I never really knew I’d be able to do. Right out of the gates, to have a job as a singer was kind of extraordinary…. Since I started there in 2012, I’ve done 10 or 11 operas with them.”
Ray began his career as a baritone, but changes in his voice, while in grad school, led him to switch to tenor.
“That was a very big change,” he said, “almost like starting over. My voice had gotten bigger and higher in pitch so I was working with my teacher and decided to try some different repertoire. Over the time I was trying both, people were suddenly much more interested in my voice once I started singing tenor. Tenors are the romantic leads typically.”
During his young career, Ray was a finalist for the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, a competition for singers under the age of thirty, and had the opportunity to sing on the Met stage.
Over the summer, he and his wife, Elisabeth Rosenberg, were finalists in the Operalia Competition, a foundation run by Placido Domingo. Neither were winners, but they got some advice from the opera legend himself.
To date, Ray’s only performed once internationally – “Carmen” in France – but he has appeared in a one-man opera at the Houston Grand Opera. Ray said it was a challenge singing in the opera based on the “Christmas Carol.” A slight tilt of the head or minor change in voice distinguished one character from the other.
As a free agent, so to speak, Ray has been auditioning for various opera companies and casting directors both in New York and abroad. Next month he’ll travel to Estonia for another audition. He and his wife plan to tour Europe and sing for some new companies.
