Baritone Patrick Mason was born in Wellsville, Ohio, and studied at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore with Frank Valentino and Ellen Mack. He has performed in recitals and concerts in America and abroad and was featured in the 1997 Philadelphia premiere of John Duffy and Joyce Carol Oates’s Black Water, as well as that opera’s New York premiere in 2000. For more than twenty-five years Mason has appeared in concerts and made recordings with guitarist David Starobin at such venues as London’s Wigmore Hall, Merkin Concert Hall in New York, and the Luxembourg Festival. He has also been a soloist with such American early music ensembles as the Waverly Consort, the Boston Camerata, and Schola Antiqua, and he has collaborated with Leonard Bernstein, Elliott Carter, Stephen Sondheim, and George Crumb. Mason—whose recorded repertoire ranges from 10th-century chant to songs by Sondheim—won critical acclaim in the leading role of the 1988 recording of Tod Machover’s sci-fi opera VALIS. He is a member of the voice faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder. For many years Mason sang regularly in synagogue choirs and as a soloist for services, and he developed a particular affinity for 20th-century synagogue music.
