Brea Baritone Wins 1st Prize

Baritone Hector Vasquez, 32, has won the $4,000 top prize in the San Francisco Opera Center’s Merola Opera Program finals.

One of 20 young, competing singers, Vasquez took the Schwabacher Memorial first-prize award for singing excerpts from Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana,” Gounod’s “Faust” and Verdi’s “Falstaff.”

“It’s very much a boost for your career,” Vasquez said by phone Thursday from his home in Brea. “But also on a personal level, it’s the recognition of your work that it brings. It’s a very nice thing to have that acknowledged.”

Vasquez also said he has just accepted an offer of an appointment with San Francisco Opera as an Adler Fellow, a two-year, training-residency program that offers master classes and coaching sessions as well as singing some roles in the yearly repertory. The program will begin in March, 1991.

Vasquez was last heard in Orange County in May, 1989, singing the bass solo arias in Bach’s “St. John Passion” with the Orange Coast College Singers directed by Richard Raub. Since then, he also has sung in a national tour with Western Opera Theater, at the Schoenberg Institute in Los Angeles and at the Ojai Summer Music Festival.

He is one of five San Francisco Opera Center singers going on a week’s tour of Micronesia, which began Thursday, ., and is scheduled to sing in a Western Opera Theater national touring production of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor.”