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06/28/2023 09:42 AMHe has performed on musical stages throughout the world. The late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an opera lover, was a fan of his voice, and this July, local residents can hear that voice when bass-baritone David Pittsinger, also a local resident, sings the national anthem at the Ivoryton Fourth of July parade.
There will be more opportunities to hear David locally in July. He will sing one of the leading roles, Captain von Trapp, in the Ivoryton Playhouse’s upcoming production of The Sound of Music from June 29 to July 30. Patricia Schuman, David’s wife and herself a renowned opera performer, will also sing in the production in the role of the abbess of the convent that figures in the plot.
The Fourth of July parade along Ivoryton Main Street, with ceremonies at the Ivoryton Green, steps off at 10 a.m. This year, Cotty and Leslie Barlow, who have worked over the years on many Ivoryton projects, are the joint grand marshals.
The line of march will include contingents from the Essex Fire Department, the Essex Historical Society, the Valley Regional High School football team, and the Essex Garden Club. The New Horizons Band of the Community Music School will play on the Ivoryton Green during the Fourth of July ceremonies.
Singing the anthem is special for David. Among the places he has performed it are Yankee Stadium and Gampel Pavilion at the University of Connecticut. As a graduate of UConn, he was particularly gratified that when he sang, the basketball team won. He has a master’s degree from Yale.
“I love patriotic music. If you look at the words of the anthem, it’s about storytelling; singing the text is a rendition of what America is and what it wants to be,” he says.
David appeared most recently at the Ivoryton Playhouse in South Pacific in the leading role of Emile de Becque, one he has frequently played in a career that includes both opera and musical theater roles. In fact, he estimates he has played the South Pacific role at least 1,000 times. He was nominated for the prestigious Helen Hayes Award for his performance of de Becque at the Kennedy Center in Washington.
But, despite his long and varied career, until the upcoming Ivoryton Playhouse production, he had never done The Sound of Music. He has set a special task for himself beyond learning his lines and music. He is determined to learn the names of the 14 children who will appear in the show as the von Trapp children, two casts of seven each.
David’s own memories of The Sound of Music go back to childhood when he was 5 years old and saw the movie with Christopher Plummer as Captain von Trapp at a long-gone drive-in theater in Clinton. He remembers he was wearing one of the classic uniforms of childhood, footed onesie pajamas.
David has often been told he looks like Christopher Plummer. The two met in Toronto, where both were performing in different productions, and David recalls Plummer saying that the resemblance, which he had also heard about, was indeed accurate.
“He said I did look like a younger version of him,” David recalls.
David’s career has always combined operatic roles with musical theater, sometimes at the same time. Once, he was performing in the opera Hamlet by Amboise Thomas at the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center as the ghost of Hamlet’s father, a role he describes as “a big sing.” But he was also appearing in South Pacific in Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater at the same time. Lincoln Center had worked out a schedule to accommodate for days when he had to perform both roles, the matinee HD Met Broadcast and South Pacific, in an evening performance.
David points out that in musical theater, an artist does eight performances a week, as many as 350 or 400 a year, but in opera, a singer would likely perform some 40 or 50 times a year.
“Many more people hear you in musical theater,” David notes. “I have probably sung for nearly 1 million people in the course of doing South Pacific.”
According to David, the way to preserve one’s voice when doing a lot of singing is paradoxical: Don’t hold back, but sing at full strength.
“The best way is to go 100% all the time,” he says. “It is much more effort to husband your resources. Doing that, you are really wasting energy.”
There are still roles that David would like to perform, among them Charlie Anderson, the role made famous by John Cullum in Shenandoah.
“A north-south split in a family. It’s relevant today,” he says.
Even more special, he would like to do Igor Stravinsky’s opera, The Rake’s Progress, with his son Richard, who has embarked on his own musical career as a tenor. Richard’s twin sister Maria is a civil engineer with the United States Department of Agriculture.
David, who describes himself as having become “something of a Stravinsky specialist,” holds the performance record for most sung Stravinsky works.
His professional schedule has taken him across the United States, Europe, and South America.
“I’ve done a lot of singing on foreign stages,” he says, “much more than at The Met, more than in this country.”
Nonetheless, David is happy to come home to Connecticut and to perform at the Ivoryton Playhouse.
“It’s a gem,” he says.
He grew up in Clinton and graduated from Morgan High School and describes himself with a classic phrase: “I am a Connecticut Yankee at heart.”
The Sound of Music at the Ivoryton Playhouse, Thursday, June 29 to Sunday, July 30. For more information, visit www.ivorytonplayhouse.org