Diana, a soprano, has been in the chorale for five years. Her favorite performance was the Brahms Requiem in the 2009-10 season. “As a stay-at-home mom, I really need something challenging and interesting in my life that is just for me. Luckily, I have a completely wonderful and supportive husband, who takes over at home and pushes me out the door on Mondays for rehearsal,” she says.
When she’s not singing, Diana is driving her boys around to their various activities, and enjoys hiking with her family and reading mysteries and biographies. She says her love of music and the performing arts came from listening to her father’s opera recordings while she was growing up and studying ballet at the Louisville Ballet’s academy and during summers at the Washington Ballet School in Washington, D.C.
During her last two years of high school, Diana was in the Louisville Ballet’s junior company and performed in the corps de ballet in productions of The Nutcracker, Romeo and Juliet, and others. “Alas, I was not really good enough to pursue a professional career in such a competitive field, so I went to college and eventually ended up in Southern California,” she says. In college a friend talked Diana into auditioning for a production of Guys and Dolls at the South Bay Center for the Arts. She was in it for the dancing, but they wanted her to sing, too! Soon, like many of us, she was a certified musical theater geek.
After taking some singing and music theory classes as an undergraduate, she sang in the
College Singers under Dr. John Alexander (currently the director of the Pacific Chorale) as a grad student at Northridge State, where she earned a master’s degree in European history. “That experience was terrifying and exciting at the same time. As a person who learned to read music as an adult, I was in way over my head, but I worked really hard to keep up and I learned to love choral music,” Diana says. Now she’s a soloist in her church choir at St. Gregory’s Episcopal, and she has soloed with Long Beach Chorale as well. She delighted all of us with a duet rendition of “This is the Night” from Disney’s Lady and the Tramp at the animal-themed concert at Rancho Los Alamitos in the 2009-10 season.
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