City Lights
November 2016

To say that Barton’s career has taken off is quite the understatement. With each performance, audience demand for a solo album only grows. Now, as the saying goes, the wait is finally over. On Friday, Barton, with pianist Brian Zeger, will release “All Who Wander.” The album features songs from three composers – Gustav Mahler, Antonín Dvořák and Jean Sibelius. Barton’s interpretation of these songs, like all of her work, is driven by storytelling.

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Musical Toronto
September 2016

My first experience of the Jamie Barton voice was the Met in HD showing of The Audition, a documentary on the 2007 Metropolitan Opera Auditions. It was a vintage year, with several young singers going on to spectacular careers. Even with stiff competition, Jamie Barton was singled out as one of the winners, for her radiant smile, gleaming tone, and engaging personality.

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Schmopera
April 2016

We had the chance to talk with American mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton between rehearsals for Washington National Opera's upcoming Ring Cycle, where she'll be singing Waltraute in Götterdämmerung, and covering Fricka in Die Walküre. In her mid-30s, Barton is familiar with the gamble that can be found in singing Wagner's music. "As a singer, especially a young singer, they tend to say 'don't do Wagner, don't sing it, don't listen to it, just stay away Wagner, it'll hurt your voice.'" For her, the difference lies less in age, and more in whether or not a singer is "built to sing it."

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Atlanta Magazine
March 2016

Barton may be an artistic throwback in some ways, but she does not adhere to its accompanying stereotype: She's no diva. "The diva mentality is very antiquated and has no place in modern opera," she says. "It's a distance that's selfish to your colleagues and your audience members. I prefer to think of us as a big community, a family of people, and you don't hold your family at arm's length."

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Musical America
February 2016

Jamie Barton is one of the fastest-rising stars in the opera world today, earning rave reviews for her keen musicality and voluptuous, richly colored instrument. The Atlanta-based mezzo-soprano has also become something of an expert on the current competition scene, having ridden a wave of wins. Musical America spoke with Barton on the West Coast in December, where she was singing Adalgisa in Los Angeles Opera’s Norma and making her San Francisco recital debut at San Francisco Performances.

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Operavore
December 2015

Recital: JAMIE BARTON. This was a great year for the art of the song... The prodigiously talented mezzo-soprano is still at the beginning of her career but already deployed a vast range of colors and emotions in a program that confidently included music in many languages, styles and moods.

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The New York Times
September 2015

A leader of a new generation of opera stars at 33, Ms. Barton is a giggly cat-video lover, with a tendency to burp when she’s nervous and the kind of exuberance that leads someone impulsively to get a nose piercing to match her publicist’s. She’s also self-possessed in the midst of a jam-packed schedule, and realistic about her future. “There’s a big part of me that’s inched away from the idea of fame, from being a household name,” she said recently at a Midtown Manhattan cafe, mulling the difficulty of a 21st-century opera singer’s becoming a celebrity like Pavarotti or Sills. But even if mezzos traditionally receive less attention than sopranos or tenors, Ms. Barton has as good a chance at greatness as anyone.

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Broadway World Opera
September 2015

With the season's first performance of Donizetti's ANNA BOLENA – that's Henry VIII's Anne Boleyn to all you Masterpiece Theatre fans – at the Met, the big news is that it's soprano Sondra Radvanovsky's first part of the Tudor Trilogy, with MARIA STUARDA and ROBERTO DEVEREUX to come later in the season. Alongside her, as Jane (here, Giovanna) Seymour, Boleyn's successor as consort to Henry, is mezzo Jamie Barton, this year's winner of the Richard Tucker Award, a past winner of the Met Council Auditions (and many other major awards) and a sensation when she sang her first big role at the Met two years ago, Adalgisa in Bellini's NORMA, opposite soprano Angela Meade.

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City Lights
September 2015

Opera singer Jamie Barton is one of Georgia’s greatest talents. A Rome native and Atlanta resident, the mezzo-soprano won the prestigious BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition in 2013 and the Richard Tucker Award earlier this year. She has graced opera houses and recital halls around the globe. Barton is gearing up for her role as Giovanna Seymour in “Anna Bolena” at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, but she is also performing a new recital program in Atlanta next week. Barton spoke with "City Lights" executive producer Noel Morris about what she will be singing. 

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Atlanta Journal-Constitution
September 2015

It’s not often that the words “down-to-earth” and “opera star” are spoken in the same breath, but both terms fit mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton perfectly. The Rome native and Atlanta resident has kept her winningly level-headed and humble outlook, even as the past few years have brought her dazzling success.

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