Winifred Cecil

Winifred Cecil, the founder of Joy In Singing, was born on Staten Island, New York. She studied singing with Marcella Sembrich and the lieder singer Elena Gerhardt. Miss Cecil's career began on the radio. She was Lanny Ross' leading lady on the Maxwell House Showboat Hour. In 1933 she was ready for a Town Hall recital which was greeted with great praise by the New York Times. That recital was followed by a transcontinental tour which led to many offers, including Hollywood and The Metropolitan Opera. But she decided to accept an offer to sing at La Scala in Milan, Italy.

After establishing herself at La Scala, she performed in other leading Opera houses throughout Italy and Europe. Her repetoire included the heroines in Tosca, Aida, La Forza del Destino, Il Trovatore, Tannhauser, Lohengin, La Nozze di Figaro, Andrea Chenier, L'amore Dei Tre Re and many others.

The outbreak of World War II prevented Miss Cecil from returning to the United States for her scheduled Metropolitan Opera debut. She stayed in Italy and later married Baron Paolo Mazzonis di Pralafera. At the war's end she acted as a liaison between American troops and the Italians, for which she was made an Honorary Dame of the Order of Malta.

Miss Cecil returned to the United States after the death of her husband in 1949 and resumed her career as a recitalist and soloist. She began teaching at the Juilliard School of Music and the University of Buffalo. During this time she originated and founded the popular master classes, The Joy In Singing.

Paul Sperry

American lyric tenor Paul Sperry, Director of Joy In Singing since 1987, is that rarity in today's musical world: a singer dedicated to preserving the song recital. Though his experience in opera extends from Monteverdi through Stockhausen, he continues to devote much of his time to the programming and performance of songs from every country and every period of music.

Born in Chicago, Mr. Sperry started piano lessons at age five, graduated from Harvard College and continued his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. He worked extensively with such masters of art-song interpretation as Pierre Bernac, Jennie Tourel and Paul Ulanowsky and studied acting with Stella Adler. This combination of liberal arts education, supreme musicianship and dramatic flair contribute to what The New York Times called "one of today's leading song recitalists." Sperry's extraordinarily wide repertory includes songs, chamber works and oratorios in fifteen languages, and includes more than fifty works that have been written for him by many of today's leading composers both European and American -among them Beaser, Bolcom, Cipullo, Druckman, Hagen, Hundley, Larsen, Paulus, Rands, Talma, Henze, Stockhausen, and Maderna.

Among his recordings are four CDs of American songs for Albany Records, Bernard Rands "Canti del Sole" which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for CRI, and the complete songs of Ives which he recorded with three other singers for Albany Records. Most recently Zephyr Records has issued a CD of Poulenc songs with pianist Ian Hobson, and their CD entitled "Great Composers Love Folksongs Too" will be available soon. Their recording of Schubert's "Winterreise" should be released late in 2001. He has edited numerous collections of American songs for G. Schirmer, Boosey & Hawkes, Peer-Southern and Dover Publications and is preparing a book of American Encores for the Oxford University Press.

Today Mr. Sperry is widely appreciated for his own master classes at the Eastman School of Music, the Peabody Institute, Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, the Cleveland Institute of Music, the University of Southern California, Harvard and Yale to name a few. Since 1984 he has taught 19th- and 20th-century song repertory and performance at the Juilliard School, and he has created there what may be the country's only full-year course in American song. He also teaches courses in American song at the Manhattan School of Music in New York. He has been a faculty member of the Aspen Music Festival since 1978, founded the Vocal Program at the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan, and served as its director from 1991 to 1997. He lives in New York City with his wife, sculptor Ann Sperry; they have three children.