Music from the heart

Recently retired Professor Richard Best's office is still filled with pictures of students and singers he worked with throughout his career, memories that remind him of singing with famous opera companies and sharing his experiences with dozens of students who are now professional singers.

Before coming to teach voice performance at the University for 30 years, Best sang not only for the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York City, but several other opera companies throughout the nation and in Europe until the age of 50, when he decided he wanted to teach.

"One teaches voice because we have to pass on all the secrets that you've learned from your teachers over the years so that the next generation can go out and do hopefully what you've done in your life," Best said. "Not every singer can teach, but luckily enough I was able to teach as well as have sung." Best, who retired Jan. 1 and now teaches part-time, will be honored Sunday night for his successful singing career and 21 years of devotion to vocal performance students at SIUC with a formal gala at Shryock Auditorium.

"I'm retiring in the literal sense, but not in the figurative sense," Best said. "They say a musician never retires, he just dies. That's true. I'm going to miss being here, but life does go on. It's time for younger blood to come in here and stir up the pot a little bit."

Best came to SIUC after renowned voice teachers Marjorie Lawrence and Teresa Stitch-Randall, who also worked along side him with the Metropolitan Opera Company. He was interviewed in Santa Fe, N.M. while working there with the Opera Company, and was hired in the fall of 1984 after being told of a position by friend Randy Black, then a student of SIUC. Since then, he has changed the lives of hundreds of students who consider it an honor to be taught by him. In fact, for many students, Best was the sole reason to study voice performance at SIUC.

Shannon Capogreco, Best's student from 1999-2003, said before she came to SIUC, she had quit singing, but after meeting Best, she fell back in love with it. "I knew I came to the University to work with him, even if I didn't know it at the time," Capogreco said.

Best described his teaching style as disciplined, the same way his teachers worked with him. He said he worked long, hard hours with his students and would not let any flaw pass by.

"I'm not an easy teacher," Best said. "I don't let things go by, especially with the most talented students. You have to give them everything you have and more." Best always pays attention to details, and would even invite the students to his house to work on weekends if they wanted to, said former student Eric McCluskey, who is now an academic adviser in the School of Music. Besides just stressing his discipline on the singing side of a vocal profession, he also would make sure his students knew everything they needed to know about a career.

"It's a never-ending process of trying to build not only the singer but the person behind the singer," Best said. Capogreco said Best would discourage students from becoming singers if their motivation was to prove something to somebody.

"You have nothing to prove to anybody except yourself and you are your best feature," Capogreco said. "You can take what they give you, but you're the one that has to apply it." Regardless of how difficult teaching voice performance can be, Best said the favorite part of his career at SIUC is seeing his hard work pay off.

"That's what a teacher lives for, that moment when you can see a student go, 'Oh, that sounds better doesn't it,'" Best said. "I think the average singer takes about eight years to really put all the tinker toys together so it makes sense." Haek Yung An, who is now a teacher and doctoral student at the University of Missouri- Kansas City, said Best was like her father.

"Mr. Best treated us like daughter and son," An said. "I've had many teachers, but he is amazing." Karen Clayton, the undergraduate academic advisor for the School of Music, is organizing Best's Sunday celebration, which will feature Italian operas with lyrics translated in the program.

"It was my idea," Clayton said. "I thought that we needed to reward him with a gala, and bring back some of the finest singers that he has taught to honor their teacher." Clayton called many of Best's former students about performing at the gala, and more than 30 students agreed.

Southern Illinois Symphony Orchestra Director Edward Benyas will direct the orchestra during the performance. Hearing that the celebration is an opera might turn people off, but the selections will highlight only the finest, Benyas said. The gala will feature 17 soloists and a chorus consisting of 14 additional singers from all over the nation, and even students from Mexico and Canada. The singers are Best's former students coming from all the years of his teaching career to honor him.

"I really feel like it's an obligation," McCluskey said. "It's the least I can do. I would really feel like the scum of the earth if I didn't sing, especially if I've been asked." Best said he was very grateful to have a performance of such a nature in his honor.

"It seems like a punctuation mark to my life," Best said. "I really don't think I deserve it, but I can't dissuade them, so what can I do? All I've done is tried my hardest to make them love music first of all and become the best singers they can possibly be."

The performance is at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 13 at Shryock Auditorium. Formal dress is encouraged.