The Opera Club of The Villages will host “An Enchanted Evening” on Saturday, March 1, 2014 at 7:00 PM at the Lake Miona Recreation Center. Proceeds from the evening will benefit the Harold Schwartz Music Scholarship Program. Tickets are on sale at The Villages Box Office for $20.00 (Villages Residents) or $25.00 (non-residents). The evening will feature performances by 2013 Grammy award winner Molly Fillmore, soprano, and international award winning piano virtuoso Ivana Ristova Kovach. The event will be sponsored by the Paul and Phylis Chu Charitable Trust.
Fillmore, a Mezzo-soprano and assistant professor of Music at Michigan State University, made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 2011 and received a Grammy Award in 2013 for her role as Helmwige in the Opera Die Walküre. She has been a featured soloist at both Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall, and made her solo operatic debut with the Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center Opera House while only a sophomore at American University.
Ristova has won 15 international competitions since 2002, and has been praised as “the woman with powerful sound.” She received first prize winner awards in Italy, Kosovo, Macedonia, and New York, among other locales around the world. She came to the U.S. and furthered her studies at Chicago’s College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University and is currently studying at the Julliard School of Music.
