William Odom is professor of German language and music diction at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has provided coaching for concerts, recitals, and opera productions, including at the New Orleans Opera. He authored the first edition of German for Singers, which appeared in 1981, and has continued to play a central role in the development of subsequent editions. **** Austrian baritone Benno Schollum studied at the University of Music & the Performing Arts in Vienna, and holds a teaching post there for 40 years, as well as annual master classes since its inception at the Franz Schubert Institute in 1978. He has been a guest professor at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, at London's Royal Academy and Royal College of Music. He combines teaching with an active singing career with repertoire extending from the great oratorios to opera, operetta, musicals, lieder, chansons and Viennese music. He has performed around the globe with among others the Berlin Philhar monic, San Francisco Symphony, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Vienna Symphony with conductors such as Yehudi Menuhin, Mstislav Rostropovich, Philippe Entremont, Adam Fischer, Zoltan Kocsis, Vladimir Fedoseyev and James Judd. He played the role of Kuno in the movie of Carl Maria von Weber's opera Der Freischutz and has recorded Schubert's Winterreise, Haydn's Creation, Handel's Messiah, Beethoven's 9th Symphony, Schubert Masses, Tchaikovsky's Iolanta, and most recently Viennese songs. **** Christina Balsam Curren spent seven years as a repertory coach at the Niedersachsische Staatsoper in Hannover, Germany. This followed postgraduate studies in collaborative piano, opera coaching, lyric diction, and voice at the Hochschule fur Musik und Darstellende Kunst "Mozarteum" (now Universitat Mozarteum) in Salzburg, Austria, where she also taught in the opera school for two years. She has given classes and worked with singers, instrumentalists, and diverse choral and opera groups in many European countries and the United States. She has coached German diction and provided English translations for German choral and stage works for churches, the Eastman/Christ Church Schola Cantorum, the Chicago-based early music collective Schola Antiqua, Ohio Light Opera, Eastman Opera Theatre, and the Nazareth College Opera Workshop. Since 1989 she has taught at the Eastman School of Music, where she is a vocal coach and a professor of German and German lyric diction, assisting singers, collaborative pianists, and conductors in deepening their understanding of (and, hopefully, delight in) the nuances of German text and vocal music.
