From Harlem to opera’s glittering stages ... that’s the journey travelled by Noah Stewart. DAVID WHETSTONE spoke to Opera North’s rising star

TAGGED on to the list of stars, and in diplomatically smaller print, film posters often announce the new talent under the line: “And introducing ...”.

Opera North do not do films, but the same might apply to their production of Madama Butterfly, directed by Tim Albery, which received critical acclaim on its last outing which brought it to Newcastle Theatre Royal back in 2007.

Back as the heartbroken Cio-Cio San – the Japanese girl abandoned and betrayed by her American lover, Pinkerton – is the French soprano Anne Sophie Duprels who, point out Opera North, “has won widespread praise in the role”.

But they add that she is joined by “a rising star of the operatic stage, Noah Stewart, an exciting young American tenor who makes his UK opera debut singing the role of Pinkerton”.

A short biography from the opera company press office rather gushingly describes the 31-year-old New Yorker as “good-looking, charismatic, photogenic”.

None of this makes him particularly exceptional but the fact that he is from Harlem, where African-American kids tend not to aspire to the great opera stages, does mark him out from the crowd.

Noah is happy to confirm this, while sharing the news that – on the other end of the phone line – he is tucking into “peanut butter and jelly”. “My first experience of classical music was at junior high school where I was specialising in science,” he says, looking back at how his budding career as an operatic tenor began.

“There was an announcement over the loudspeaker, that they needed men to join the choir.

“I decided to go and audition with some of my buddies. They didn’t stick around but I was really intrigued by the music.”

He recalls, with laughter in his voice, the exciting opportunities that started to come his way through his membership of the choir, including singing backing vocals for Mariah Carey and the rapper Coolio. He also contributed voice-overs for Sesame Street.

“Growing up in New York, there were so many opportunities for us,” he says. “My first solo was at the Waldorf Astoria which was a particularly significant thing.”

He thinks it might have been a memorial concert for the film star Audrey Hepburn but the details escape him, obscured perhaps by the responsibility resting on his young shoulders.

Evidently it soon became clear that here was a boy with a voice worth developing. Noah recalls a teacher telling him, when he was about 12, ‘You have what it takes to be a singer as a career’.