A Conversation With Angela Turner Wilson of the Fort Worth Opera

For Fort Worth Opera’s new general and artistic director, Angela Turner Wilson, a day without music is like a day without sunshine. Since her early teens, Wilson has spent the majority of her time refining this notion by either prepping for a performance or actually being in one.

In her new role at the FWO, Wilson is taking a more behind-the-scenes approach, helping pick the performances that will be showcased for the upcoming FWO’s 78th season, plus, various other duties.     

Wilson, a soprano, has years of experience performing, not just in the Fort Worth Opera, but other collectives, including New York City Opera, Washington National Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Boston Lyric Opera, Atlanta Opera, Portland Opera, and the Dallas Opera, among others.

She also performed at the White House during the Clinton administration in 1998.

“I was just pinching myself that I was there,” she recalls.

Wilson has a Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance from University of Mississippi and a Master of Music in Vocal Performance from the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. She also has an Artist Certificate in Vocal Performance from SMU.

Wilson has also served on the faculty of the Vocal Arts Division at TCU since 2008 and served as chair of the vocal arts division. On top of that, she’s also the founding director of TCU’s “Festival of American Song,” a three-day fest that celebrates the genre of American song in all its various likenesses.

The upcoming 2023-24 operatic season with seasonal subscription renewals are available now with individual tickets available in mid-July.

Fort Worth Magazine sat down recently with Wilson to chat in the Kimbell Art Museum's Renzo Piano Pavilion.

What inspired you to go in this direction of opera?

You will hear this from other opera singers, it found me. I did not grow up a classically trained musician. At my house growing up it was Waylon [Jennings], Willie [Nelson], Linda Ronstadt, and a bunch of great Texas musicians. I was always the loudest kid in the elementary school chorus.

Then I took piano and my piano teacher, who was also my third-grade teacher, in Norman, Oklahoma, got me involved with the music department doing musicals. I was the kid in all of those. When I got to middle school, the music department at Oklahoma University was doing an opera, “Albert Herring,” that had significant children’s parts. My teacher prepared and coached me for the audition process, and I got the part when I was 12 years old turning 13. Being in that show, I remember thinking this was the hardest thing I’ve ever sung, and why is there so much music, why is there so much action and why was this going on?

Then I remember thinking, this is where I fit. I didn’t have to think about blending with other voices like when you are in a choir. Solo, I could just sing and that was it. From there, when we moved to Mississippi, I started studying with a voice teacher there at the university. I was her youngest student at 13. After she identified me, then it was competitions and voice lessons.  

What was your experience like being the chair of the Vocal Arts Division at TCU? You took that job right before the pandemic.

Yeah, don’t do that during a pandemic, that’s crazy [laughs]. Teaching these young aspiring students when they have to wear an M95 on their face while they give a voice lesson was tough. We kept trying to find a platform that was better than Zoom, that can give us better audio with no delay; or hitting high notes that the audio can’t handle. Then there was writing policy and trying to figure everything out. To me, that part was the most heartbreaking and difficult thing. We did whatever we could to help keep these students viable for whatever the world left us. It was up to me and my colleagues to make sure that these singers could survive and be there and be ready. It was harrowing.

Talk about the “Festival of American Song.”

I started that really as a passion project. Through Cliburn at the Modern with Buddy Bray, I had many opportunities to sing with composers and try new American works, as a singer. I knew how this experience improved my musicianship and my artistry. I thought, if my TCU students could have that experience of working with a composer on that composer’s material, performing it and then having that relationship, they could build that important connection. Those conversations with composers are where I learned there were reasons for the timing of certain notes and why I needed to sustain for three beats and take the rest. I learned not to overlook what they’ve written and try to think myself smarter. I will honor what’s on the page.

Doing this was as much fun for me as anybody. There’s a real sense with opera, when you get in that zone and you feel this fullness that I think the whole human experience goes, “Oh, my Gosh, yes, I get it, that is pure humanity.” That’s opera, it’s so extreme. There’s a side of you that feels a connection with an artist when they are singing. It’s a part of you that you don’t tap into every day, but when you feel it, you know there’s some kind of connection going on.

Performing at the Clinton White House must have been quite an experience.

First of all, it was fantastic because you meet downstairs in the green room and there’s all these images of the greats like B.B. King and Aretha [Franklin], and I was just pinching myself that I was there. It was amazing. I was there for the state dinner for the prime minister of Italy, Romano Prodi, and I’m singing in Italian. I was like, ugh, I had to give myself a bit of pep talk.

Plus, I was singing Puccini which is like singing the Italian national anthem. They had me enter by all these circular tables and on one table you have President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary, Sofia Loren, the prime minister, and somebody else, but it was this whole group of people you normally only see on TV. I was like, ‘What?’ I think I saw soap star Susan Lucci there, too.

When I got my cue to go on, I was supposed to meander through the tables and sing this aria [self-contained, solo vocal piece] and I had no idea that the lighting was going to be so vivid. It was very bright. I remember telling myself at that time, “Be in the moment, be here.” I didn’t want to rush through it and just do my job, I wanted to take it in because I was at the White House singing for the president and the prime minister of Italy. I wanted to be present for that moment.  

What does your job as general and artistic director entail?

Right now, I am Fort Worth Opera 360. Pretty much every aspect of the opera, I’m in there. So, I’m in the artistic side, I’m in the business side, I’m in all of it. My job is to work with the board, help the board increase in size, but also to be there for them and guide the vision and the purpose of the company. It’s a very interesting role because you work for the board, they’re the ones running the company, but I’m in charge of the day-to-day operations. I also do a lot of fundraising. This part of the job is great because we have a lot friends, the board themselves, including a few donors who stepped away pre-pandemic, that have all stepped back in to help.

As artistic director, though, I am also in charge of casting, artist development, and planning the season. I choose the shows the FWO puts on.

Give us a preview of the 78^th season of the Fort Worth Opera?

Just backing up a bit, one of our main concerns in every fine arts group, is how do we meet our community, give them what they want and also survive and be part of that community. So, with that we have done a lot of listening. One of the great things about being a former singer is that you know a lot of singers and we try to push some of those singers who are on the cusp of breaking out into the spotlight.

With that, we are offering “La Boheme,” since it’s been a while since we did it. Last time we tried to do it, it was 2020 and we had to cancel due to Covid. To me, I love that show, I know it backwards and forwards. They’d already programmed it and people were excited about it.

We have “Driving While Black,” being performed at the Kimbell and two other performances at TCU. This was a show that came to me out of the Festival of American Song. The composer is Susan Kander. This she wrote in 2017 with her BFF, Roberta Gumbel. Roberta is Black and Susan is white, and Roberta’s son was starting to drive. She came to Susan and said, “I’m dying, because of what I have to send my son out into, and it scares me to death.” So, they wrote this 48-minute-long piece for cello, soprano, and percussion. It’s written in Roberta’s voice. After the show there is a talk back and when we are doing this show at TCU, we are also pulling in some community leaders to be a part of that and we are going to livestream it with TCU.

We are also doing Children’s Opera Theater, which is our first year back at Bass Hall doing their children’s education performances. We’re the fourth-grader slot, which includes 6,000 fourth graders being bused into Bass Hall and we are going to scare them a little bit with Hansel and Gretel when we shove the witch in the oven. Plus, there’s a musical called the “Medium” which I found out about while going down the rabbit hole on YouTube. It’s about a fake psychic that is an alcoholic and all of a sudden one of the seances she gives is real. Somebody gets killed and it all happens in an hour and 15 minutes. I love the music from that. It’s got these really kind of creepy arias where it’s like minor modalities but also really melodic.