STORIES as SONG Vocalist Andrea Edith Moore turns the writings of local authors into a unique album by DAVID MENCONI
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s an album, Family Secrets: Kith & Kin is unique — and uniquely North Carolina. It’s deeply rooted in the local arts community, a work that is equal parts opera, chamber-music piece, and literary song cycle — with banjo, no less. And it boasts some big names among the credits, though they’re names not normally associated with music: Daniel Wallace, Lee Smith, Frances Mayes, Jeffery Beam, Michael Malone, Randall Kenan, and Allan Gurganus. The album is the brainchild of opera singer Andrea Edith Moore. A soprano 34 | WALTER
vocalist, Moore has sung on stages all over the western hemisphere, from the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado to the Hamburger Kammeroper in Germany. For all those travels, however, the Chapel Hill native didn’t make her first album until coming home to North Carolina. “Being a classical singer, it’s not a straight shot to The Met,” Moore says by phone from her home in Hillsborough, over barking from the family dog Frank “Chairman of the Bark” Sinatra in the background. “Growing up, I always loved musical theater and Broadway. At age 10, I asked my parents if they’d get me a
Broadway agent and move to New York with me. Well, that didn’t happen.” Pursuit of her singing ambitions took Moore to the North Carolina School of the Arts for the last two years of high school, followed by studies and degrees at Yale University and Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University. Eventually, she made her way back to the Triangle, where she teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and sings locally with North Carolina Opera. A bit more than a decade ago, she initiated the process of what eventually became Family Secrets.
Courtesy Cricket Photography
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