Roche Guest Artists Series: James Harrington, Bass, and Sandra Leary, Piano
The 2025-26 Roche Guest Artists Series concludes its 36th Season with James Harrington, bass, and Sandra Leary, piano, on Monday, April 27, 8 p.m., in Walker Recital Hall in the Audrey Hirt Academic Center. They will perform works by Faure, Ibert, Debra Lynn, Richard Rodgers, and Frank Loesser, among others. Admission is free and open to the public.
On Tuesday, April 28, 12:45 to 1:45 p.m., James Harrington will give a vocal masterclass in Walker Recital Hall, also free and open to the public, featuring five voice majors from the D'Angelo Department of Music.
Please contact the music office at 814-824-2394 with any questions.
Praised by Broadway World as “a compelling actor” with a “rich and powerful bass voice,” James Harrington is a versatile artist whose performance credits span the jazz, pop, orchestral, and opera stages.
Harrington made his Santa Fe Opera debuts in Strauss’ "Capriccio" and Puccini’s "La fanciulla del West," and has also appeared with Portland Opera (Monteverdi’s Songs of "Love and War"), Nashville Opera (Lodovico in Verdi’s "Otello," Marquis in "La Traviata," Fouquier Tinville in Giordano’s "Andrea Chénier"), Opera Idaho (King in "Aïda"), and Houston’s Opera in the Heights (Sarastro in "Die Zauberflöte"). He began his exploration of the great Wagner repertoire singing Fafner, Hunding, and Hagen in "Der Ring an einem Abend" with Pacific Northwest Opera, reprising Hunding in a recital of Act I of "Die Walküre" with tenor Kyle Van Schoonhoven and soprano Sarah Cambidge at Rosch Recital Hall in Fredonia, New York. He recently rejoined the workshop of Phil Kline’s "The Lives and Dreams of Nikola Tesla," starring Anthony Roth Costanzo, at NYC’s Guggenheim Museum, and reprised Sarastro in Mozart’s "The Magic Flute" with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra.
A noted American expert on the intersection of performance and entrepreneurship training, he is the author of "Building a Career in Opera from School to Stage: Operapreneurship" (Routledge, 2020), and has been invited to speak to students at Yale University, New York University, the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, Utah State University, University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley, and to colleagues at the International Congress of Voice Teachers, College Music Society, and National Opera Association. In the spring of 2024, he was an artist teacher in residence at ISA-Universidad de las Artes in Havana, Cuba.
Harrington is an assistant professor of voice and jazz studies at the State University of New York at Fredonia. As a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he held the Paul J. Collins Wisconsin Distinguished Fellowship. He earned his Master of Music in Performance from Florida State University and his Bachelor of Music in Music Business and Management at Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Sandra K. Leary is a collaborative pianist and piano educator based in Fredonia, NY. She holds a B.M. in Piano Performance and Pedagogy and an M.M. in Collaborative Piano from SUNY Fredonia, where she teaches class piano and works extensively with vocalists and instrumentalists in performances and studio settings. Sandra also maintains a thriving private piano studio and is known for her warm, patient teaching style. Outside of music, she enjoys cycling, cooking, and spending time outdoors with her family.