Musician Bios
Waiton Farrell,
bass-baritone
is the founder and creative director for HAUTE Opera. Originally from Philadelphia, PA, he has performed since the age of 6. He was a semi-finalist in Rochester Classical Idol and has been a featured bass soloist in Mozart’s Requiem, Orff’s Carmina Burana, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, and Händel’s Messiah. He has performed the roles of Don Alfonso in Cosí Fan Tutte and Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd. He developed the Starch & Glitter concert series in 2016 as an opportunity to present a fashionable and opulent evening of opera, musical theatre, and art song in an intimate concert setting. As of March 2022, S&G has expanded its vision to become HAUTE Opera. Previous concert events that he has curated and presented include: Starch & Glitter (2016), A Clockwork Cadence (2017), Colour Me Yours (2018), Reaper Madness (2019), Sanguine Seductions (2021), Stratospheric: An Evening With HAUTE Opera (2022), and most recently Plummet Upwards in Berlin (June 2023). He has also been a featured performer at Modern Eden Gallery openings, including “Midnight Garden” in October 2020, a virtual opening curated by Beautiful Bizarre Magazine; and “Lore” in October 2021.
On 13 and 14 October, 2024 he will present his next curated Berlin concert event in collaboration with pianist Utako Washio: Dreadful Blossoms, in the Pepsi Boston Bar at SchwuZ Queer Club.
Waiton currently resides in Berlin, Germany, where he continues to expand his shimmering vision for HAUTE Opera, while pursuing a career as a performer, art curator, and fashion stylist. He loves shoes, champagne, and sarcasm.
Utako Washio, piano
is a collaborative pianist and music educator with Japanese roots from Düsseldorf, now based in Berlin.
Classical music has been in her life since she started to play the piano at the age of four, won prizes at the competition Jugend Musiziert in the category Duo. She sang in the children’s choir at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, where she discovered her passion for the musical theatre. The first opera she performed as a pianist was Pollicino (1979) by Hans Werner Henze in Neuss and Montepulciano, Italy. During her studies at the Folkwang University of Arts Essen, she was awarded with the Excellence Scholarship as an accompanist. At Music Universities in Leipzig and Dresden, she studied vocal coaching, musical theatre repetition and Lied accompaniment. She worked as a repetitieur in several opera productions at the German opera houses and Opera Academies, while her studies. She played in stage rehearsals for La Bohème, Tosca, L’Italiana in Algeri, Der Freischütz, Der Wildschütz, Die Lustige Witwe and Faust/Margarethe. In 2017 she played her first Japanese opera piece Rette uns Okichi! (original title: Kurofune = eng. Black Ship) by Kosaku Yamada at the Neuköllner Oper. From 2018 to 2021 she was as an Ensemble member of Musiktheater im Revier and Theater Lübeck, where she worked on Mass (Bernstein), Rusalka, Tolomeo (Händel) and Gespenstersonate (Reimann). Furthermore she worked on educational music projects and experimental opera projects. In 2020 she was the main pianist for the hybrid opera production ALIVE! at Theater Lübeck, which included live performance, music videos and online streaming. Since she moved to Berlin in 2021, she worked as a music educator, vocal coach and accompanist at the music school Joseph-Schmidt. Her recent opera production was the world premiere Es ist ein Wandel über mich gekommen (2022) by Margarete Huber at Musikakademie Rheinsberg.
She made her HAUTE Opera debut in June 2023 in collaboration with bass-baritone, Waiton Farrell, for concert and art exhibition Plummet Upwards, presented at The Ballery in Berlin, Germany.
She will join Waiton again in concert for a series of performances of Dreadful Blossoms on 13 and 14 October, 2024 in the Pepsi Boston Bar at SchwuZ Queer Club.