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http://bostonvoyager.com/interview/meet-bulent-guneralp-voice-studio-arlington


Meet Bülent Güneralp of Bülent Güneralp Voice Studio in Arlington

BostonVoyager Staff October 30, 2017


Today we’d like to introduce you to Bülent Güneralp.


Bülent, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.

I am a professional singer, drummer and instructor. I perform in many genres, but my career focus is opera.


I was introduced to opera by, and received my first vocal training from my mother, sublime dramatic coloratura soprano Aysel Tunalı in Istanbul, Türkiye (Turkey). Then I studied with coloratura soprano Suna Korat (a national artist of Türkiye). I studied at The Istanbul University State Conservatory with Çiçek Kanter. I was invited to the US by conductor, William Thomas. I continued my studies at Longy School of Music with Donna Roll, and graduated from The Boston Conservatory, where I studied with the amazing Robert Honeysucker, who just passed away. As I continued performing, I developed my teaching studio in Boston.


The first person who encouraged me to teach was my music theory teacher, Mine Mucur, at The Istanbul University State Conservatory, where I majored in voice/opera, and studied piano. In my later conservatory years, I also played drums in The Istanbul State Theater Orchestra conducted by Önder Bali.


Some vocal highlights in the US include: the Turkish language premier of the role of Sultan in the Ukrainian opera Cossack Beyond The Danube by Semen Hulak-Artemovsky with The Commonwealth Lyric Theater (My mother and I created the Turkish libretto for this role); the roles of The Master and Yefim in the US-premiere of the opera Desire to Sleep by Moshe Shulman with The Juventas New Music Ensemble; the narrator in the English language world-premiere of Expérience by Phivos-Angelos Kollias with The Juventas New Music Ensemble; the world-premiere of Missa Patri Pio by Leonardo Ciampa; the role of Jewish Man in the world-premiere of the opera The Prioress’s Tale by Delvyn Case; The Omaggio al Bel Canto Best Interpretation Award at The Stelle dell’Anno Nuovo Festival in Boston (organized for the members of The Boston Opera Collaborative by The Dante Alighieri Society Italian Cultural Center of Massachusetts and The Consulate General of Italy); official recognitions by The Massachusetts State Senate and Thomas Menino; a feature program on CCTV; and a performance at the historic USS Salem in the inaugural maritime festival of Quincy, Massachusetts, where I sang the solos of Emile de Becque from the musical South Pacific by Rodgers & Hammerstein.


Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?

For many years I taught the trio of voice, drums and piano both in my private studio and in music schools. As my studios grew, it was a challenge to maintain a healthy balance between performing and teaching. Teaching had become very intense. Now I mostly teach voice in my private studio with reduced hours. I am resuming performing.


Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Bülent Güneralp Voice Studio – what should we know?

I teach students of all ages, voice types and levels from beginner to professional. They come from diverse backgrounds such as opera, musical theater, jazz, pop, rhythm & blues, bluegrass, country, rock, heavy metal and public speaking. Their reviews at bulentguneralp.com speak for themselves.


Technique comes before genre. The main technical aim in the studio is to help students express their own, natural, pure, and style-free voice, which can be applied to any musical style or vocal field. Lessons typically include physical warm ups, breathing exercises, vocal exercises and technical work, visualizations, basic music theory and ear training, musical and repertoire work, diction work, characterization, and audition / concert preparation. However, all the training and technical mastery should serve to help the student sing from the heart, which may require a fresh look inside and even a journey toward what we really are, transcending both what we think we are and what others think we are. In this sense, the work I do with students may vary according to their readiness and willingness to progress at different levels toward voicing themselves with self-confidence.


The diverse and colorful conversations I have with students in the studio range from the vocal maxims of the great Italian master Giovanni Battista Lamperti to the Thrive diet of the Canadian triathlete Brendan Brazier.


Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?

Credit goes to so many people, including family members, friends, teachers and colleagues, that it would be impossible to name them all in an interview.


I will mention two:


First and foremost, my mother Aysel Tunalı, who always guides, supports and inspires me with love and wisdom. Words fail here.


Second, conductor William Thomas, who discovered me in Istanbul during his 1998 tour of Greece and Turkey, performing Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. He was looking for local soloists, and the Cemal Reşit Rey Opera Company, where I was preparing to sing in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio), recommended me to him. After I sang under his direction in Istanbul, he returned to the United States with a recording of mine, and a personal recommendation for me to attend Longy School of Music. Shortly after that, I received a letter from Longy, offering me a full scholarship, and an invitation from William Thomas to solo in Händel’s Messiah Oratorio in Tokyo, Japan. Since then, I have sung in many performances under his direction.


Mr. Thomas passed away in 2013. He was my professional mentor and a very special friend, as he was to so many other artists. During his many years of service on the faculty of Phillips Academy in Andover, and as Founding Music Director of The Cambridge Community Chorus, he touched and enriched the lives of literally thousands of students, performers and colleagues, including me. Words fail to express my gratitude. He was a most precious and generous human being, and a sublime conductor, cellist, musician and artist.


In 2008, The Cambridge City Council dedicated the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Douglass Street as “William Ethaniel Thomas Square”.

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“Cossack Beyond the Danube” is a folk-flavored singspiel about Cossacks from the Ukrainian steppes living reluctantly under Ottoman rule.

THE BOSTON GLOBE


MAY 15, 2015

OPERA REVIEW

A ‘Cossack’ from far beyond the Danube

By Jeremy Eichler GLOBE STAFF 


NEWTON – It’s a truism by now that the line between art and politics can be exceedingly thin. Last year, the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko made headlines for a highly public donation to the opera house of Donetsk, and for posing with the flag of Novorossia, a separatist confederation in eastern Ukraine.


Yet when it comes to disentangling the musical legacies of this particular region, the task is hardly simple. Take the Ukrainian-born singer Semyon Hulak-Artemovsky (1813-1873). As a boy soprano, he was recruited from Kiev by Glinka, one of the fathers of Russian national opera. He trained both in Russia and in the great houses of Europe, and he sang professionally in St. Petersburg, both in fashionable Italian opera productions as well as in Russian ones. He was in fact one of the original creators of the role of Ruslan in Glinka’s “Ruslan and Lyudmila.”

But Hulak-Artemovsky was also a self-taught composer, and he wrote one work that has brought him immortality in the region of his birth. “Cossack Beyond the Danube” – which received its local professional premiere on Thursday night in Newton -- is a folk-flavored singspiel about Cossacks from the Ukrainian steppes living reluctantly under Ottoman rule. Ivan Karas, the Cossack of the title, accidentally meets the Sultan disguised as a commoner, and wins permission for all the Cossacks to return to their homeland.
Despite the Italianate style of much of the vocal writing, the piece has been celebrated as the first Ukrainian national opera. Doing so, however, required translating the composer’s own Russian-language libretto into Ukrainian, which was done during the Soviet era. These days, the work is still heard in Kiev, and the National Opera of Ukraine in fact lists a new production opening later this month.
The work’s genealogy would seem to argue against simplistic appropriation of any kind. Still, the members of the Newton-based Commonwealth Lyric Theater (Alexander Prokhorov, artistic director) made a touchingly earnest gesture simply by mounting the work this year with a cast that included both Ukrainian and Russian singers. Soprano Olga Lisovskaya explained from stage that their performance was dedicated to peace.

The production itself, a well-attended community event, was full of color and charm. The opera’s far-fetched plot demands no more (or less) suspension of disbelief than others in this genre, and “Cossack” abounds in earthy, tuneful music. On Thursday, a few stretches of spoken dialogue seemed to fall shy of their comic mark. But the dancing (from two Ukrainian dance ensembles) and singing (both solo and choral) was vivid, skillfully executed, and full of ardor.

Dmytro Pavlyuk sang the role of Ivan Karas and Galina Ivannikova was his long-suffering wife; Lisovskaya sang Oksana, their adopted daughter, and Adam Klein was Andriy, her partner. Bülent Güneralp was the benevolent Sultan. Voices of these principals came across forcefully in the acoustic of the First Baptist Church. The choral sound, too, was full and rich, and the orchestra crisply directed by Lidiya Yankovskaya.

If this work has had multiple layers of meaning in its native lands, it no doubt took on a few more when performed far from the Danube or Dnieper Rivers and closer to the Charles. Lisovskaya, who lives locally, spoke of growing up with this opera in Kiev, and made a special point of explaining this production’s departure from the traditional costuming that many in the audience may have been expecting based on performances that live in memory. Ultimately, the night felt like less of a political statement on the current conflict, and more like a communal bridge backward – in a way that only music can do -- to an earlier time and place.
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THE BOSTON MUSICAL INTELLIGENCER

DECEMBER 9, 2012
Juventas Framed by Quirky Space
by Sam Bodkin

On Saturday night, the Juventas New Music Ensemble, now in its seventh year, brought to The Museum of Modern Renaissance in Somerville a program of five works by five composers, all of whom were under 36.

It seems almost fitting that an evening filled with music that blurred the lines between form and function started with my having blurred my own lines between being a reviewer and being a mere concert-goer. Though I had carefully budgeted my time, a fight between the T operator and a commuter made for a 25-minute delay at the Boylston stop, so I missed the first half of the first piece, Expérience, by Phivos-Angelos Kollias. It wouldn’t be fair then for me to comment on it other than to say that the governing principle behind the piece as I understood it was that a singer on stage, baritone Bülent Güneralp, was not actually singing words for the audience passively to hear, but rather, giving the audience directives, so that they would be actively engaged. The music would swell, and every individual in the concert hall was to be part of the creation process, as he or she understood the sounds in his or her own way. From what I heard, the music was much more about texture than any discernible melody or harmony, and I rather liked the idea behind the piece.

The quite short second piece, Sumerian Poems by Yohanan Chendler, inspired by some 5,000 years old poetry, was quite a challenge. Though it did have interesting moments, neither cohesive structure nor drive was apparent. Moreover, the Sumerian inspiration was unclear, in part because the audience was not provided with the poems. The French horn player, Yoni Kahn, gave a particularly memorable performance, showcasing “textural” capabilities of his instrument with which I was unfamiliar. He was joined by pianist Christina Wright-Ivanova, clarinetist Wolcott Humphrey, and violist Elizabeth Stefan.

Without a doubt, the most affecting piece of the evening was next: Desire to Sleep, by Moshe Shulman. It was a sort of operatic scene-within-a-scene, starting with a maid exhaustedly rocking a baby to sleep while slipping in and out of consciousness herself. Her master comes in and beats her for her negligence but when he leaves, she falls asleep and dreams of a scene wherein she has become her own mother, taking care of her ill father (played by the same fellow who had played the master in the beginning of the scene) in his last moments of life. She wakes up, and the scene concludes in the room where it began, with the baby still in the crib. The piece is an insightful and moving meditation on the ambiguities of consciousness/unconsciousness dichotomy, and how that ambiguity speaks to the relationship between life and death. The often-beautiful music powerfully evoked the lethargic and irresistible calls of sleep, the chaos of waking existence, and the cyclical nature of life. Both of the singers (Anne Byrne and Bülent Güneralp) were outstanding dramatically and musically. They were supported by cellist Michael Dahlberg, bassist Jonathan Davies, bassoonist Adrian Morejon, violist Elizabeth Stefan, percussionist Brian Calhoon, and the violinist and clarinetist from the previous piece.

After intermission came As If Your Human Shape, by Graham Flett. It was a work of high post-modernism, unusual for this program as through-composed. The soprano, Anna Ward (who deserves special mention for the jaw-dropping precision and range of her voice) came on stage singing and carrying a large drum that was then taken over by the percussionist. She held up a flute for a while, before taking a seat. As a performer, she was playing with and exploring the world of the musicians. They were not merely sitting there creating sounds for us to hear. They existed as physical objects in the world of this work of art. The words were computer generated, necessarily devoid of meaning, existing only as “textness”. Unfortunately, while the idea was interesting, the music itself seemed remote. But might have that been the point? Such is the problem with any post-modern work: its re-appropriation of itself as an object of art renders it almost impervious to criticism. In addition Ward, the ensemble comprised violin, cello, piano, horn, clarinet as above, and flutist Orlando Cela. Erin Huelskamp served as stage director for this piece and the one above.

Last on the program were three scenes from an upcoming ballet HackPolitik, composed by Peter Van Zandt Lane. Inspired by the notorious hacker-group Anonymous, it featured four dancers (Andrew Trego, Matthew Ortner, Chelsea Robin Lee, and Kate Ladenheim, all members of the contemporary dance company People Movers Dance), all of who were wearing black leotards and masks to represent the anonymity of their online personae. The dancing, choreographed by Ms. Ladenheim, was largely characterized by choppy, segmented movements that would become more fluid when the dancers started moving in unison. When the music got going, it was rhythmically and melodically reminiscent of the soundtrack from a 1960’s spy show, no doubt a nod to the sly and secretive act of computer hacking. But this score was far more angular, jarring, and sophisticated than music from TV of that era. The live performance was also often melded with computerized sonic textures, which gave the work an altogether 21st -century feel, suggesting that the secret agents of our era are not corporeal beings like James Bond, who run and climb and swing and drive, but rather, cyber beings whose range of movements do not take place in the physical world. Of course, an irony of this construct is that these cyber-gestures were represented by the most physical of activities—Dancing. Indeed, the piece was a clear effort to keep high art performance relevant by framing it as a reflection of the hot-button issue of cyber-terrorism, One wonders, though, if the divide between the physical and the cyber-world is expressible in something as traditional as a ballet. Perhaps entirely new modes of expression need to be developed. Still, the offering was well worthwhile; at its best moments being very compelling. The performers (pianist, violinist, cellist, violist, flutist, clarinetist, and percussionist) executed brilliantly, and the dancing was, to my untrained eye, excellent.

There was another artistic presence, the one which framed the concert, and that was the venue. I had never been to the utterly remarkable Museum of Modern Renaissance before. Every square inch of the ceilings and walls of the concert hall is covered in beautiful, colorful paintings, both representational and abstract. It added tremendously to the experience. Surely, this is a unique Boston-area attraction that more people should know about.
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THE SOMERVILLE NEWS

July 16, 2009
Bringing opera into the new millennium
by Chelsea Whyte

When you think of opera, the word modern doesn't usually follow. Bülent Güneralp, a Turkish singer living in Somerville, is changing the way we think about this centuries-old art form. Güneralp is anything but a stereotypical opera singer. Instead of the classic caricature of a rotund performer draped in velvet, he's a soft-spoken man, small in stature and simple in his habits. He admits to living a focused life, almost monastic in nature, though it's easy to forget his quiet manner when he opens his mouth to sing and his baritone voice fills the room.

His foundation in music started with his mother, an opera singer in Turkey, who first introduced him to singing. After studying opera at the Istanbul Conservatory for 8 years, he met conductor William Thomas and came to Boston in 1998 to study at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, and eventually at the Boston Conservatory where he graduated in 2003. Since then he has lived in several Boston-area towns, but he has been in Somerville for the last 4 years and says "Somerville's one of the best places I've lived." 

In addition to singing, Güneralp studied percussion and played in the Istanbul City Theater Orchestra for 2 years, and with a rock band in Istanbul. He isn't merely an opera singer, but a well-rounded musician. He has performed Broadway pieces, jazz solos, spirituals, and even contemporary pop songs, which he says inform his interpretation of even the most classical roles in opera. This approach to opera may be what draws crowds who aren't as familiar with the genre. 

Alongside many young opera singers in Somerville, Güneralp brings a new interpretation to even the most classic repertoire. He says this has resulted in many opera singers having bigger followings in the past few years. According to Güneralp, "There is a growing young population who appreciate opera." This may account for his recent success, including performances with the Boston Opera Collaborative, Enterprise Opera in Rhode Island, La Scena Concert Duo, and Musica Anatolia International Contemporary Music Ensemble.

Güneralp has also performed contemporary opera, most recently in The Prioress's Tale, a re-imagination of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, with themes relevant to today's audiences. Güneralp cites this opera's message of "peace and overcoming differences to find mutual understanding" as his own political philosophy, and says "organizations committed to promoting tolerance are drawn to this opera." Opera in the new millennium, even opera based on a 14th century tale, can be relevant to today's society and bring communities together for a cause.

Güneralp loves the diversity in Somerville and sees a trend toward people from many backgrounds coming to shows. "Opera is appreciated more and more by people from so many different areas of life," he says. Because of its comprehensive nature, opera can draw a crowd with many interests, including singing, dancing, and acting. Güneralp sees this as one of opera's main draws, saying that "in certain periods in the past, people seemed to be losing interest in opera, but I think the general situation is much better now, and there is a growing interest in opera." This opera singer, who says his favorite music ranges from that of the heavy metal 80s band Cacophony to jazz pianist Chick Corea, shows that opera singers may not be what you think, and his audiences are surprisingly diverse as well. Opera has evolved, and Bülent Güneralp is evolving along with it to reach new audiences. 

His bass-baritone voice will next be showcased in the Boston Opera Collaborative production of Georges Bizet's Carmen, playing July 17-19 and 24-26 at the Bulger Performing Arts Center at Boston College High School. For more details on Bülent and his upcoming performances visit www.bulentguneralp.com.
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