FEATURE PROFILE

Two Callings:
Sheryl Heather Cohen

Sheryl Heather Cohen, soprano soloist in Tempesta di Mare's upcoming Hoshanna! Hebrew Music of the High Baroque, is a singer with two callings. As opera singer Sheryl Heather Cohen, she's sung in Don Giovanni, Die Fledermaus, Hansel and Gretel—and Tempesta di Mare fans will remember her turning into a tree in Handel's Apollo and Daphne a few years ago. As a National Winner in the most prestigious talent search in the field of opera, the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, she's sung at the Met. Twice.

She's also Sherry Cohen, a Cantorial Soloist at Philadelphia's Congregation Rodeph Shalom, the great tiled and gilt Moorish synagogue on Broad Street just north of Spring Garden. For more than 11 years, she's led worship services at one of the oldest Jewish congregations in the Western hemisphere.

"Oh yes, singing at the Met in competition is very exciting," Cohen says. "The crowd is huge, they're all strangers, every eye is on you, judging." Rodeph Shalom is a completely different experience. "It's comfortable, calm, familiar. You're leading people in prayer, after all."

Opera and cantorial chant both run in Cohen's blood. Her mother, an opera singer, was her first voice teacher, and she was a cantorial soloist at her home congregation in Newton, MA. While studying at Philadelphia's Academy of Vocal Arts a few years after winning the Met award, she got her break at Rodeph Shalom. One of the Cantorial Soloists got sick during the High Holy Days. Cohen knew the repertory from childhood and stepped right in.

Being both entertainer and spiritual leader doesn't bother Cohen. She loves it. "It's me underneath, no matter what I'm doing," she says. "When you're leading a service, maybe you're more yourself than when you're playing some character. But when you're portraying a character, it's you telling an important story through that character."

Her name, Cohen, brings her Jewish heritage into her concert career. Certainly, times have changed. The days when opera stars Belle Miriam Silverman, Reuben Ticker, Moishe Miller, and Jacob Pincus Perlemuth had to perform as Beverly Sills, Richard Tucker, Robert Merrill and Jan Peerce are long past.

Or perhaps not that long. "After I won the Met competition," says Cohen, "an old man came up to me, very, very kind. He had a beard and looked like an old-fashioned rabbi. He congratulated me. I said thank you very much. He said, have you considered changing your name? I said, no, I haven't. You might want to reconsider it, he said, it's too Jewish sounding." She laughs.

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