EUGENE - Making her West Coast debut on Friday in the US premiere of
Tan Dun's "Water Passion After St.  Matthew" is a 29-year-old soprano
from the Midwest, with a European career, now living a Boston.  Her name
is Elizabeth Keusch and she has a unique gift in addition to technique
to burn and superior musical ability.

What's unique about Keusch is that, lacking a better tag, she is a high
coloratura with a normal chest voice.  In "Water Passion," almost all of
her music is in the high C to E range, and she sings every note dead on,
without a hint of effort or shrillness.  She sings the extreme high notes
the way a very, very good soprano handles music in a comfortable range.
The best thing about Keusch is that she produces Yma-Sumac stuff as if
it were real music - nothing showy or weird, just excellent singing, a
beautiful sound.  How high can she go? She won't tell because "I don't
want to give composers ideas."

Three years ago, she joined Tan and Osvaldo Golijov in preparation for
their works in Helmuth Rilling's Stuttgart "Passion 2000," "Water Passion"
and "La Pasion Segun San Marcos," respectively.  She also sang in other
works by Tan, including "2000 Today:  A World Symphony for the Milennium."

Since moving to Boston, she's been working a lot:  Mahler's Eighth with
Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic, Mahler's Fourth with Alan
Yamamoto and the Colorado Music Festival.  She hasn't appeared with the
"big orchestras" yet, but that's just a matter of time and waking up some
lazy scouts for New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc.

Keusch participated in the world-premiere opera productions this past
season of Paul-Heinz Dittrich's "Zerbrochene Bilder," at the Musikakademie
Rheinsberg and Helmut Lachenmann's "Das Madchen mit den Schwefelholzern"
in Stuttgart and Paris.  She will perform Grigori Frid's "Das Tagebuch
der Anne Frank" at the Holocaust Museum in DC.

Janos Gereben/SF
In Oregon, to July 8
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