Bemidji State vocalists shine at Schubert Club competition

Apr. 13—BEMIDJI — A pair of talented sophomores are shining a spotlight on the vocal music department at Bemidji State University.

Baritone Zhicheng He and soprano Hailee Colgrove advanced to the finals of the Schubert Club's Bruce P. Carlson Student Scholarship Competition at Macalester College in St. Paul last month. By placing second in the Level I Voice Division, Zhicheng earned an invitation to sing at the Musicians on the Rise Recital to be held on Saturday, April 13, at the Ordway Theater in St. Paul.

"Both of them sang beautifully," said Cory Renbarger, professor of music and director of Bemidji Opera Theater at BSU. "Zhicheng really came out swinging. It was a lot of fireworks and just really impressive technically. Hailee gave a stunningly emotional performance. They made themselves and us proud."

Both singers made the finals after submitting video auditions. They were adjudicated by world-renowned soprano Deborah Voigt and also had a private question-and-answer session with Voigt. Zhicheng finished third in last year's Schubert event; this was Colgrove's first time at the competition.

"I wasn't expecting anything out of it," said Colgrove, a graduate of Pillager High School. "I was just going to audition, and do what I could do. It was such a cool experience. I was so happy that I got the opportunity to be there because it's people from all over the region. There were eight of us in the category and two of us from BSU."

Zhicheng, who moved from his native China to Chanhassen, Minn., as a freshman in high school, sang challenging pieces by George Frideric Handel and Henri Duparc. He will perform the Duparc piece, "Le manoir de Rosemonde," at the Ordway.

Renbarger says Handel's "Honor and Arms" is "a bombastic, heroic piece with a lot of fast melismas and runs. It really requires an agile, kind of virile tone to it. The Duparc song is a very emotional, very charged piece that requires maturity of musicality. It really takes a mature musician to be able to sing that piece."

Zhicheng said he was surprised to be chosen for the Ordway recital.

"It is really a huge honor," he said. "I appreciate it so much."

Hailee and Zhicheng both became aware of Bemidji State through BSU Sings, a program headed by Jennifer Olson, assistant professor of music.

It's an online educational video series for choral students and teachers that Olson launched during the coronavirus pandemic. It now reaches more than 40,000 students across 25 states.

"I spend hours and hours every week looking up the schools in each state trying to find the choral teachers' contact information and personally emailing them," Olson said.

Colgrove said that meeting Olson, along with fellow music faculty members Dwight Jilek and James Bowyer, was the main reason she chose to enroll at BSU.

"I had other schools I was considering," she said, "but I was pretty set on BSU after getting to work with them. Everyone here is so great. The community is so good. The professors are awesome."

Colgrove is majoring in music education and plans to go on to grad school to pursue a master's degree in vocal performance.

"Then I want to take every opportunity I can (to perform)," she added. "I'd like to do opera stuff and recitals. I plan on keeping up my teaching license and going back to teaching later on."

Olson said, "Hailee is a ray of sunshine. She's extremely hardworking, she's very mature and she's just really kind."

Zhicheng likely would have attended a larger university had it not been for a technical twist of fate. After leaving Beijing for Minnesota, he found the language barrier to be a challenge, but music made the transition easier, and his booming baritone voice made people take notice.

He reached out to schools like Boston University and the Universities of Indiana, Michigan and Minnesota. But he did so using his Chinese email account, and when those schools replied, all of the responses were in English, so they went to his junk mail folder.

By the time Zhicheng discovered that glitch, deadlines for admission applications had passed.

That's when his high school choir director suggested he consider BSU.

"I said, 'Where is Bemidji?'" Zhicheng recalled. The director reminded him of the visit that Olson had made to Chanhassen, where she had a master class with the young baritone.

"She was impressed with me, and also I was impressed with her skill and her kindness," Zhicheng said. A second recruiting visit from Olson and Renbarger included a performance by the BSU professors.

"They sang an awesome, fabulous duet and I was so shocked by their voices," Zhicheng said. "At the time, I did not know they were from Bemidji State University. I only knew that they were awesome."

Colgrove was unaware of Zhicheng's junk mail story, but said, "It's good that those emails went to spam. We snatched him right up."

Renbarger agrees.

"Zhicheng has just been going gangbusters," Renbarger said. "He's an amazing student, and he's an aggressive learner. He's really hungry and looking to make his career as a solo classical vocalist."

Students like Zhicheng and Hailee are examples of the talent that runs through the school's music department these days, Olson said.

"I've been here for five years, and this is by far the best my studio has ever been," she said. "I am just bursting my buttons with pride over all of my students. These students come in and they don't even know what they're capable of yet, because they just haven't been exposed. It's really fun to open the door to possibilities for them. The fact that at the Schubert Club, we had two in the finals, when the other finalists were from across the country with more access to resources, was amazing."