Before he was a wine merchant — and before he was the lead singer in local hard rock band One Sixty One — Eric Mihan was an opera singer.
Though his operatic skills have mostly lain dormant for the past ten years, this Sunday Mihan, who owns Bangor Wine & Cheese Company in downtown Bangor, will take the stage for the first time since 2006 to perform with the Bangor Symphony Orchestra in its season-closing concert: a semi-staged performance of Puccini’s “La Boheme,” set for 3 p.m. Sunday, April 24 at the Collins Center for the Arts.
“I’ve known about this for a year, so I’ve had plenty of time to prepare for it. But I’m still really determined to make sure I do the best job I possibly can,” said Mihan, 37, a classically trained vocalist who will sing the bass-baritone role of Colline. “I want people to know that I can really sing. I’m putting a lot of pressure on myself.”
The BSO’s “La Boheme” will be the first time in recent memory — possibly the first time ever — that the venerable orchestra performs a full opera. Excerpts and arias from various operas have been performed at the BSO’s yearly choral concert, traditionally the final concert of the season held in April. But a full opera, with staging and costuming, is a first for the BSO.
“The idea originated when [BSO executive director] Brian Hinrichs mentioned that ‘La Boheme’ would turn 120 the same year that the BSO would turn 120, which is this year,” said music director Lucas Richman. “Also, we always have a very strong response to our choral concert. And, of course, there is an audience here that has always been rabidly devoted to opera, which is even more devoted now with the Met in HD broadcasts.”
The choral concert always features the University Singers and the University of Maine Oratorio Society, as well as the Bangor Area Children’s Choir, and usually features soloists. This year’s soloists will do double duty — more than just singing the parts with a score in front of them, they’ll actually be acting onstage.
“It’s all memorized, so the storytelling is immediate and visceral,” said Richman. “It will give an added dynamic to what’s happening during the concert.”
Starring in the lead roles of Rudolfo and Mimi are tenor John Bellemer and soprano Emily Birsan; other roles include soprano Jamilyn Manning-White as Musetta, baritone Dan Kempson as Marcello and baritone Aaron Engebreth as Schaunard. Other singers include Ralph Cato, who performed with the BSO in 2011, and Bangor area residents Ira Kramer, seen in a number of Penobscot Theatre productions, Justin Zang, a University of Maine choral conducting instructor; and Mihan.
Mihan got his start in opera while studying music at Hamilton College in upstate New York. Across Lake Otsego from Hamilton lay the Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, where Mihan sang for three seasons in the late 1990s — and where Mihan met his future wife, Christine Bragg Mihan, a Bangor native who was working backstage during a production of “Aida.”
Several years performing with opera companies and at concerts throughout the East Coast and in Europe followed, but by 2006, Mihan decided that the not-particularly-lucrative life of a touring opera singer was not for him, and moved full-time into the wine world, where he’d already started working in New Jersey. In 2009, he and his wife bought Bangor Wine & Cheese Company and moved to her hometown of Bangor to run a business and raise a family.
That’s not to say that Mihan has given up music altogether: since 2010 he has been the lead singer and a guitarist for OneSixtyOne, a local hard rock band known for covering other bands like Black Sabbath, Van Halen, Neil Young and Pearl Jam. Ozzy Osbourne isn’t exactly opera — and that’s a bit of an understatement — but Mihan says that opera and rock have far more in common with each other than you might expect.
“It’s all about interpreting the music, and you have to have a certain kind of stamina and skill and ability to command a stage,” said Mihan. “You have to really know how to sing properly, or else you’ll ruin your voice and you’ll run out of energy… the end result is very different, but the method is surprisingly similar…. And I just love to sing, whatever the genre.”
Tickets for the BSO’s April 24 concert at the Collins Center for the Arts are available at the Collins Center box office, or by calling 581-1755. For more information, visit bangorsymphony.org.
