Press
Palm Beach Daily News 01.23.2010
The central character of Otello — the Moor — was sung by tenor Carl Tanner. He proved to belong to that rare vocal class, "an Otello tenor." Since the first Verdi Otello, Tamagno, the role has carried a special onus. It requires great stamina and expressive forcefulness along with a record number of high A-flats. Many of the great tenors in history have steered clear of the demands of this role. Tanner proved more than equal to the its challenges. He has a richly timbred tenor with a clear and astounding ringing force in the top register. His clarion opening act, Esultate, was bright and vigorous. The love duet with Desdemona, Già nella notte densa, was charged with warmth and passion. The dark closing scene's Niun mi tema showed Tanner at his most affecting: "un bacio, un bacci ancora, un altro baccio" (a kiss, another kiss, ah! another kiss), the beautiful Verdian triple theme underlying the lover's dying moments.
Carl Tanner in Elan Magazine 12.17.2008
Though he jets around the world, Carl Tanner always returns home to Arlington. His story is a flight of fantasy, which has taken him from stints as a truck driver and a gun-toting bounty hunter to a career as a world-renowned tenor. Read the enitire article here
Carl Tanner to receive an honorary Doctor of Music Degree from Shenandoah University 12.03.2008
The summer of 2009 Carl Tanner will be receiving and honorary Doctor of Music Degree from Shenandoah University, located in Winchester, Virginia.
Carl Tanner sings Enzo Grimaldo in the Teatro Real production of "La Gioconda" 03.08.2008
Excerpts from Jose M. Irurzun review, "International Opera Review"
"Enzo Grimaldo was sung by American tenor Carl Tanner, returning to the Teatro Real after singing Pinkerton last July. His performance here was very convincing, showing off a brilliant voice, much better produced than before. My feeling about him is that he is truly a dramatic tenor who is in his element in the heavier repertoire, like Calaf, Samson or Chenier. He is at his best at the most dramatic moments, and finished his main aria with a pianissimo high B flat effortlessly."
"..."the final bows were a triumph for Violeta Urmana, with very warm receptions also for Tanner, Fiorillo and Ataneli, in addition to Maestro Pido."
Excerpts from The Washington Post 08.28.2005
In the Opera Hall, This Trucker Delivers Carl Tanner's Career Is Picking Up Speed T.R. Reid Washington Post Staff Writer
Interstate 95, as usual, was one long traffic jam. Carl Tanner, as usual, was singing to pass the time, up in the cab of his 16-wheeler. As the trucker inched forward on the exit ramp toward Old Keene Mill Road, he launched into the Puccini aria "E lucevan le stelle."
In the next lane, a woman in a convertible called up to him: "Is that you, or is that the radio?"
"That's me, lady," Tanner replied.
"Well then, you've missed your calling," the woman declared. "You should be singing for a living, not driving."
"That proved to be a comment with fateful consequences, sparking Tanner's transformation from trucker to tenor, with a stellar career. But for Carl Tanner, the suggestion was hardly novel. Ever since his junior year at Washington-Lee High School -- when he used to sing the national anthem before football games and then trot out to play center for the Generals -- people had been telling the Arlington native that his voice was his fortune. He even earned a college degree in vocal performance. But that didn't produce any gainful employment.
So Tanner enrolled in the Northern Virginia Trucking Academy and spent the better part of the 1980s driving big rigs for employers like Fairfax Movers and the Northern Virginia Florists' Pool.
To pick up extra money on the side, he moonlighted as a bounty hunter for Arlington area bail bondsmen.
"I was carrying a 9mm Beretta with the extended clip, the one that holds 23 bullets," Tanner recalls. "Ridiculous weapon. You gotta be a pretty bad shot to fire at some guy 23 times and not hit him."
All of this seems immensely far removed from the glamorous world of today's Carl Tanner, an operatic tenor of international stature whose huge but bright voice has been heard from Covent Garden to La Scala, from New York to Berlin to Naples to Washington (he sang the lead in the Washington National Opera's "Samson et Dalila" in May).
This summer the 43-year-old Virginian is performing a juicy tenor role, playing Calaf at the Santa Fe Opera's production of Puccini's "Turandot." In many ways the tenor is still a trucker at heart. He looks and talks like the central casting version of a burly truck driver, right down to the 2 1/4 -carat diamond ring set in a big block of platinum on his finger. And he is clearly astonished at what has happened to him in the decade since he took the advice of that woman on I-95.
"I'm standin' in the 7-Eleven on Lee Highway one day, I'm buyin' a Slurpee, and some kid comes up to me and says, 'Aren't you Carl Tanner?' I mean, it blew me away. And last year I'm in Vegas, I'm takin' in a show, and all of a sudden I hear Wayne Newton -- I mean, it's Wayne Newton! -- saying, 'Ladies and gentlemen, we have one of the great American tenors in our audience tonight.'"
This particular great American tenor still lives in Arlington -- he bought himself a fixer-upper three blocks from the Ballston Metro station -- and still finds time to sing at Central Methodist Church on Fairfax Drive, where his father served for years as the caretaker.
In his high school days in Arlington, Tanner says, he knew he was a good singer, but never thought there was a career in that fact.
"Then a teacher told me that this fat guy in Italy named Pavarotti makes $6 million a year singing opera. And I thought, 'Might be worth a try.'"
After graduating in 1980 -- two years before another Washington-Lee star alum, Sandra Bullock -- he made his way to the Shenandoah Conservatory in Winchester to study vocal performance. Tanner was training as a baritone there until a professor, Jackson Sheats, convinced him that his voice was really that of a spinto dramatico , the heroic tenor who sings grand opera roles like Calaf in "Turandot" or Don Jose in "Carmen." (Examples of this "dramatico" style can be heard by clicking "Multimedia Archives" below.)
That switch proved essential to Tanner's singing career -- but it took nearly a decade after leaving Shenandoah to have any singing career at all. He spent those years driving trucks by day and chasing bail-skippers by night, singing only in the shower or in the cab of his rig.
In one sense, that decade was a detour from his operatic destiny. "It definitely slowed everything down," Tanner says. "While my contemporaries were going around to the small [opera] companies, landing roles, getting experience, I was driving a truck."
But in the highly competitive world of contemporary opera, where a stirring spinto dramatico voice is hardly enough to distinguish one ambitious tenor from a dozen others, Tanner's tough-guy background has turned out to be a spectacular marketing device. The trucker-turned-tenor, who spins out lively stories from his former life with practiced flair, is fully aware of the competitive advantage his unusual career path provides.
"I'm a huge name in opera right now," Tanner says in a matter-of-fact way. "There are a lot of other guys out there, a lot of good singers -- but they weren't truck drivers. They weren't bounty hunters who had some juvenile on the lam fire 17 shots at them. They don't have a story to tell, and I do."
Tanner's life story took its most dramatic turn two weeks after that chance conversation in the Beltway traffic jam. The woman in the convertible was just one of several people who urged him, near the end of 1990, to give up trucking and try for a singing career.
His employer at the time, FrameMasters in Fairfax, staked him $1,000 to go to New York and get started as a professional singer. Tanner found a job at a now-defunct restaurant called Asti, where the waiters sang operatic arias. He stuck with the arias he had practiced all those years in the truck.
One night in late 1991, after he belted out "E lucevan le stelle," a customer gave him a warning: "You're singing on your capital, not your interest."
That customer just happened to be Richard Gaddes, a veteran opera producer who is now general director of the Santa Fe Opera.
"It was clear he had a wonderful vocal instrument, but he didn't know how to use it," Gaddes says, recalling the evening at Asti. "What I meant was, he was going to use up that voice and have nothing left unless he learned some technique."
Through Gaddes's intervention, Tanner signed on as an apprentice for Santa Fe's 1992 and 1993 seasons, learning the basics of breathing and muscle control and the smooth legato line that can preserve a voice for decades. The tenor then set out, in standard fashion, to perfect his craft at smaller opera houses around the world.
One of his first breaks came from the Opera Theatre of Northern Virginia, which signed Tanner in 1994 to sing the title role in a rarely performed Puccini opera, "Edgar."
"I was from Northern Virginia, and they gave me one of my first leads," Tanner recalls gratefully. "And those Puccini heroes are perfect for my voice."
His summer in Santa Fe has earned positive reviews and loud cheers from the audience. Tanner has punched most of the standard tickets for an American operatic career -- New York City Opera, Washington National Opera, Santa Fe, Opera de Montreal. Last December he sang "O Holy Night" on the Ellipse as the president and first lady lit the National Christmas Tree.
Tanner hopes to sing more roles for director Placido Domingo in Washington, and he has a busy schedule of roles around the world through 2010 or so.
In short, Arlington's Carl Tanner is looking at a glittering future in the world of opera. But if things go wrong, he says, he won't be destitute: "I still know how to drive a truck."
Associated Press 08.05.2005
Trucker Trades Open Road For Opera Singer Also Spent Time As Bounty Hunter, But Burly Tenor Found Lure Of Music, Performance Proved Hard To Resist Deborah Baker SANTA FE, New Mexico
To hear Carl Tanner tell it, there's nothing out of the ordinary about his trajectory to opera: frommusicstudent to truck driver to bounty hunter to globe-trotting tenor.
After all, the big, burly guy with Virginia in his voice and a down-home demeanor always sang - to the country station on his dad's car radio ... with the chorus in high school, where he wrestled and played football ... in his 18-wheeler, Tosca blaring from the cab.
As a child, I knew that I had this ability to go, `Waaaaaa - and really well, recalled Tanner, his voice suddenly soaring above the lunch-crowd babble on the leafy campus at the Santa Fe Opera. But I never would do it, because I didn't understand what it was. ... I didn't know what operatic voices were.
Even after he figured it out, it would be years before Tanner embraced the notion of singing as a career.
It took me so long to learn to love it, he said. But love it he does, particularly the demanding role of Calaf in Puccini's Turandot, in which Tanner is making his Santa Fe Opera debut this summer. He describes the role, which he has done more than 50 times, as a marathon for the tenor.
Tenors who sing this role don't grow on trees. It requires tremendous stamina, said Richard Gaddes, general director of the Santa Fe Opera.
Gaddes, who first heard Tanner sing at a New York restaurant 15 years ago, says the tenor has an absolutely world-class voice. He's a wonderful musician.
Christina Scheppelmann, director of artistic operations for the Washington National Opera - where he performed Samson in Saint-Saens Samson et Dalila last spring - rates Tanner as among only a handful of tenors who excel at the Italian and French dramatic repertoires.
He's also a very generous, really nice guy who benefits from his varied background, said Scheppelmann, who has known Tanner about nine years.
He's just very grounded. ... If youre a bounty hunter, and have bullets flying left and right, it does put a wrong note into perspective, she said.
Tanner, 43, who grew up in a working-class family in Arlington, Virginia, got amusicdegree for my mom from Shenandoah Conservatory in Winchester, Virginia.
She wanted a son with a college degree, he explained.
But music didn't feel like a fit. Too hard a way to make a living. He didn't think he was smart enough. Opera seemed stuffy, intimidating, too full of airs for a Virginia boy.
He handed his diploma to his mother and got a license to drive a truck.
"And I loved it," he recalled.
But the money wasn't that great, and when he heard through a friend that a bounty hunter was looking for a partner, he says he started collaring criminals at night and on weekends.
Bounty hunters work for bail bond companies, arresting fugitives who have skipped out on their court appearances. Tanner learned to use a gun - and carried at least a couple - but says he relied more on his wits and what his partner called his gift of gab.
In my two years as a bounty hunter, I had 178 cases and picked up 169 people, Tanner said proudly.
But it got increasingly dangerous, and the last two cases drove him out of the business.
He went to pick up a teenager in West Virginia who he claims shot at him 17 times before he managed to tackle and handcuff him.
On the ride back to Virginia, he found himself preaching to the kid about life choices - all the while thinking to myself, `You know, I have a damn degree in music.
The last job was the worst. According to Tanner's account, a fugitive who was determined not to be captured jumped to his death from his apartment window right in front of Tanner.
Within weeks, Tanner was in New York, looking for a job. Gaddes heard him at a restaurant that featured aspiring singers.
"I called him to the table and said to him, `Young man, you have a wonderful voice ... you need now to go and really study, gain a technique, learn how to sing," Gaddes recalled.
Tanner, who was an apprentice for two years at the Santa Fe Opera, has sung at La Scala as Don Jose in Carmen and at Covent Garden as Cavaradossi in Tosca. He was Dick Johnson in La fanciulla del West with the Opera Orchestra of New York and the Deutsche Oper Berlin, and Pinkerton in Madame Butterfly in Las Palmas.
CBS The Early Show
07.27.2005
Till The Bounty Hunter Sings
Dave Price
Many people change careers or know someone who has. It can be a life-changing experience.
"I thought I was making a big change when I went from human resources to weather," says The Early Show's Dave Price, "But it's not nearly as drastic a career move as the man you are about to read about."
The story of his transformation is about as dramatic as his performance on stage at the Kennedy Center.
Carl Tanner says, "When Placido read in the Washington Times that I was a bounty hunter, he came to my dressing room one night and he was, like, 'Are you serious?'"
Tanner always knew he wanted a career in music. He even earned a degree from a conservatory in his home state of Virginia. But like many artists, he wound up doing whatever he had to make ends meet.
Tanner says, "People that go into the arts thinking it's going to be smooth sailing for the rest of their lives - Uh huh."
Tanner got a job as a trucker, then became a bounty hunter, meeting people like the infamous Mad Dog Chapman along the way.
Discussing the bounty hunter profession, Tanner says, "In that field, you know if you make it, and if you're able to stay alive, you're lucky. He's one of the good guys in the field."
So how do you move from being a bounty hunter to becoming a rising opera star?
"Literally, I got shot at, then chased a guy out a window" says Tanner. "And then I thought: 'You know, my number's coming.' Two weeks later, I was driving my truck and I decided to move to New York to pursue opera."
It took him about ten years to go from working class to world class, performing at the most celebrated stages, including the Kennedy Center in Washington, La Scala in Milan and The Royal Opera House in London. He's spending this summer at the Santa Fe Opera.
Richard Gaddis, general director of Santa Fe Opera, says, "He's already a world-class singer. But I think that he's probably going to become a great star."
Despite his new life, he hasnt forgotten his old one. He still enjoys target practice and relies on his old bounty hunter bravado when necessary.
But are there times when he is performing with one of these divas or dealing with someone who is high strung in a performance, and he wishes to go back to his bounty hunter days, kick a head against the wall and throw them in a car?
Tanner says, "I've worked with some divas that won't show up for rehearsal, and you know, I've learned that I just do my job and then when they come, I make it as difficult as possible."
Believe or not, this man with the fearsome voice sometimes suffers from stage fright.
"You know, I get more nervous stepping onstage sometimes than I did when I'd have to kick someone's door open - when I was going after them," remarks Tanner. "They were wanted, suspected of murder or something like that."
Tanner has a remarkable life story, but its a story with one regret.
He says, "My mom and dad got to see me sing the Lord's Prayer in church, but they never got to see me sing opera. So as an homage to my parents, for each major show that I do, if I can, if it's not sold out, I purchase two tickets in the audience and leave those seats open. I leave those seats for my mom and dad."
And he believes that he's climbing to the top because of what his parents taught him as a child.
He says, "I know that this was my calling, and I know that when this ride stops, I'm grateful for everything that's happened."
Tanner will be performing through the end of the summer at the Santa Fe Opera, and this fall, he'll be performing in Tokyo. In fact, he's one of the busiest opera performers in the world. He's booked until the year 2009.
The Washington Post
12.14.2003
From Bagging Criminals to Booming Arias
Annie Gowen
Tanner, a rising star on the international opera scene, confidently strides to his place onstage before members of the Choral Arts Society of Washington and launches into the first velvety notes of 'O Holy Night.Interstate 95, as usual, was one long traffic jam. Carl Tanner, as usual, was singing to pass the time, up in the cab of his 16-wheeler. As the trucker inched forward on the exit ramp toward Old Keene Mill Road, he launched into the Puccini aria "E lucevan le stelle."
In the next lane, a woman in a convertible called up to him: "Is that you, or is that the radio?"
"That's me, lady," Tanner replied.
"Well then, you've missed your calling," the woman declared. "You should be singing for a living, not driving."
That proved to be a comment with fateful consequences, sparking Tanner's transformation from trucker to tenor, with a stellar career and now a date with the Metropolitan Opera. But for Carl Tanner, the suggestion was hardly novel. Ever since his junior year at Washington-Lee High School -- when he used to sing the national anthem before football games and then trot out to play center for the Generals -- people had been telling the Arlington native that his voice was his fortune. He even earned a college degree in vocal performance. But that didn't produce any gainful employment.
So Tanner enrolled in the Northern Virginia Trucking Academy and spent the better part of the 1980s driving big rigs for employers like Fairfax Movers and the Northern Virginia Florists' Pool.
To pick up extra money on the side, he moonlighted as a bounty hunter for Arlington area bail bondsmen.
"I was carrying a 9mm Beretta with the extended clip, the one that holds 23 bullets," Tanner recalls. "Ridiculous weapon. You gotta be a pretty bad shot to fire at some guy 23 times and not hit him."
All of this seems immensely far removed from the glamorous world of today's Carl Tanner, an operatic tenor of international stature whose huge but bright voice has been heard from Covent Garden to La Scala, from New York to Berlin to Naples to Washington (he sang the lead in the Washington National Opera's "Samson et Dalila" in May).
This summer the 43-year-old Virginian is performing a juicy tenor role, playing Calaf at the Santa Fe Opera's production of Puccini's "Turandot." In 2007 he will get a starring role at New York's Metropolitan Opera.
His operatic schedule is so full that he expects to make between $1 million and $2 million annually for the next five years. But in many ways the tenor is still a trucker at heart. He looks and talks like the central casting version of a burly truck driver, right down to the 2 1/4 -carat diamond ring set in a big block of platinum on his finger. And he is clearly astonished at what h
"I'm standin' in the 7-Eleven on Lee Highway one day, I'm buyin' a Slurpee, and some kid comes up to me and says, 'Aren't you Carl Tanner?' I mean, it blew me away. And last year I'm in Vegas, I'm takin' in a show, and all of a sudden I hear Wayne Newton -- I mean, it's Wayne Newton! -- saying, 'Ladies and gentlemen, we have one of the great American tenors in our audience tonight.' "
This particular great American tenor still lives in Arlington -- he bought himself a fixer-upper three blocks from the Ballston Metro station -- and still finds time to sing at Central Methodist Church on Fairfax Drive, where his father served for years as the caretaker.
"I suppose I will buy a place in New York, with the Met contract coming up," Tanner says. "But Arlington will always be home for me."
In his high school days in Arlington, Tanner says, he knew he was a good singer, but never thought there was a career in that fact.
"Then a teacher told me that this fat guy in Italy named Pavarotti makes $6 million a year singing opera. And I thought, 'Might be worth a try.' "
After graduating in 1980 -- two years before another Washington-Lee star alum, Sandra Bullock -- he made his way to the Shenandoah Conservatory in Winchester to study vocal performance. Tanner was training as a baritone there until a professor, Jackson Sheats, convinced him that his voice was really that of a spinto dramatico , the heroic tenor who sings grand opera roles like Calaf in "Turandot" or Don Jose in "Carmen." (Examples of this "dramatico" style can be heard at his Web site, http://carltanner.com/ .)
That switch proved essential to Tanner's singing career -- but it took nearly a decade after leaving Shenandoah to have any singing career at all. He spent those years driving trucks by day and chasing bail-skippers by night, singing only in the shower or in the cab of his rig.
In one sense, that decade was a detour from his operatic destiny. "It definitely slowed everything down," Tanner says. "While my contemporaries were going around to the small [opera] companies, landing roles, getting experience, I was driving a truck."
But in the highly competitive world of contemporary opera, where a stirring spinto dramatico voice is hardly enough to distinguish one ambitious tenor from a dozen others, Tanner's tough-guy background has turned out to be a spectacular marketing device. The trucker-turned-tenor, who spins out lively stories from his former life with practiced flair, is fully aware of the competitive advantage his unusual career path provides.
"I'm a huge name in opera right now," Tanner says in a matter-of-fact way. "There are a lot of other guys out there, a lot of good singers -- but they weren't truck drivers. They weren't bounty hunters who had some juvenile on the lam fire 17 shots at them. They don't have a story to tell, and I do."
Tanner's life story took its most dramatic turn two weeks after that chance conversation in the Beltway traffic jam. The woman in the convertible was just one of several people who urged him, near the end of 1990, to give up trucking and try for a singing career.
His employer at the time, FrameMasters in Fairfax, staked him $1,000 to go to New York and get started as a professional singer. Tanner found a job at a now-defunct restaurant called Asti, where the waiters sang operatic arias. He stuck with the arias he had practiced all those years in the truck.
One night in late 1991, after he belted out "E lucevan le stelle," a customer gave him a warning: "You're singing on your capital, not your interest."
That customer just happened to be Richard Gaddes, a veteran opera producer who is now general director of the Santa Fe Opera.
"It was clear he had a wonderful vocal instrument, but he didn't know how to use it," Gaddes says, recalling the evening at Asti. "What I meant was, he was going to use up that voice and have nothing left unless he learned some technique."
Through Gaddes's intervention, Tanner signed on as an apprentice for Santa Fe's 1992 and 1993 seasons, learning the basics of breathing and muscle control and the smooth legato line that can preserve a voice for decades. The tenor then set out, in standard fashion, to perfect his craft at smaller opera houses around the world.
One of his first breaks came from the Opera Theatre of Northern Virginia, which signed Tanner in 1994 to sing the title role in a rarely performed Puccini opera, "Edgar."
"I was from Northern Virginia, and they gave me one of my first leads," Tanner recalls gratefully. "And those Puccini heroes are perfect for my voice."
For all that experience, though, Tanner is still prone to rookie problems. Singing the lead role in "Turandot" before a full house at Santa Fe earlier this month, he managed to stumble on the final, triumphant notes of "Nessun dorma," the show-stealing aria that a Turandot audience waits for all night long. That resounding finish -- where Calaf proclaims, three times, "Vincero!" ("I shall prevail") -- should be one of the most spine-tingling moments in all of opera. Tanner barely got it out of his throat.
"I knew I was having trouble with my breathing," the tenor said the next day. "I was thinking, 'Carl, what's wrong here?' I tripped over each 'vincero.' "
Nonetheless, his summer in Santa Fe has earned positive reviews and loud cheers from the audience. Tanner has punched most of the standard tickets for an American operatic career -- New York City Opera, Washington National Opera, Santa Fe, Opera de Montreal. Last December he sang "O Holy Night" on the Ellipse as the president and first lady lit the National Christmas Tree.
In 20 months he is due to perform the lead in Mascagni's "Cavalleria Rusticana" at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The tenor relishes the opportunity, but wonders why it took so long.
"The Met is the crown jewel for American singers, and I'm an American," he notes. "A decent American tenor, even one who started late, like me, shouldn't have to wait until he's 44 to debut at the Met.
"The Metropolitan Opera should be developing American singers, looking for them," Tanner continues. "But in my case, they waited until I was famous to give me my first chance. It's an American house, but they keep giving the big contracts to these Europeans."
In addition to the Met, Tanner hopes to sing more roles for director Placido Domingo in Washington, and he has a busy schedule of roles around the world through 2010 or so.
He is also trying to put together financing for a CD of Christmas songs, centering on his signature version of "O Holy Night."
In short, Arlington's Carl Tanner is looking at a glittering future in the world of opera. But if things go wrong, he says, he won't be destitute: "I still know how to drive a truck."
As his tenor voice soars over the choir, Norman Scribner, the Choral Arts Society's venerable musical director, says in a stage whisper:
'Domingo is crazy about this guy. He is really a comer.'
Indeed, Placido Domingo, the Washington Opera's general director, has asked Tanner to star in the opera's upcoming productions of Verdi's 'Il Trovatore' and Saint-Saens's 'Samson et Dalila' next season."