Michael St. Peter, tenor section leader/soloist in the UUCSR choir moved back to hometown Chicago over the summer, and we are pleased to welcome Brian Jeffers to Shelter Rock as our new leader in the tenor section. Brian has served as a substitute section leader in the past, and we are eager to have him as a part of our musical team. We will miss Michael, and wish him our very best in this next phase of his life.
Brian Jeffers is a NYC-based vocalist and actor praised as a flexible and heroic tenor (Opera News). His 2022/2023 season engagements included his mainstage role debut as Beadle Bamford in Sweeney Todd, as well as Lillas Pastia in La Tragedie de Carmen with Chautauqua Opera, and his symphony debut with the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra. In March, he made his Lincoln Center chorus debut as part of the NY Philharmonic Chorus in Adolpus Hailstork’s oratorio Done Made My Vow, as well as Mozart’s Mass in C Minor with the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall.
In 2016, he made his professional debut in the world premiere of Jonathan Dawe’s Nero and The Fall of Lehman Brothers at Columbia University’s Casa Italiana, and was a guest artist at The Juilliard School’s revival of Dawe’s Cracked Orlando, with their Center for Innovation in the Arts. He has been seen with Aspen Opera Center, Bronx Opera, Opera Saratoga, Chautauqua Opera Company, New Amsterdam Opera, Axelrod Performing Arts Center, and City Lyric Opera.
Active in choral and popular repertoire, he is a member of the New York Philharmonic Chorus, has performed the solos in Mozart’s Requiem, To Be Certain of a Dawn (Paulus), King David (Honegger), The Creation (Haydn) at ASU Gammage, Vesperae solennes de confessore (Mozart) and Messiah (Handel). As a chorister, he has performed Britten’s War Requiem, Verdi’s Requiem, Bach’s B Minor Mass, Orff’s Carmina Burana, Poulenc’s Gloria, and Brahms’ Ein Deutches Requiem. He has performed as a backing vocalist for Kristin Chenoweth with the Phoenix Symphony, and, in early 2023, appeared with the Gloria choir and with Sharon Stone on Saturday Night Live with musical guest, Sam Smith.
Submitted by Stephen Michael Smith, Music Director, Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Shelter Rock