50 UNDER 50
Sarah Heltzel grew up in a house full of music: Cole Porter, Cat Stevens, The Police, hymns, classical music. In high school she began performing in musicals and theater, discovering she was a natural performer who needed refinement and coaching. That’s where Gordon came in: Tom and Susan Brooks, music professors during Sarah’s college years, got her started on the path to a career in performance. Like all opera singers in the United States, Sarah is a freelancer. Her life is itinerant: travel for auditions, months away for performances in far-flung locations. In March she sang the role of Jo in Mark Adamo’s 1998 opera Little Women with Opera on the James in Virginia—a role she has been anticipating for 10 years. “It’s a challenging score, but a very accessible story that so many of us grew up with. Jo struggles with her coming of age— something we can all relate to,” she says. “A lot of us grew up with thinking we can do anything, go anywhere, but as adults we realize that there is significant sacrifice in the making of art. But the joy for me in opera is in collaborating with others who love music and drama, and in offering our art in public performance,” Sarah says. “When you have truly given yourself, and the audience is perfectly still, applauding, or weeping, you know you’ve created a theatrical moment that will never come again. It has power to change people.” Sarah opened the 2013–14 season with Wagner’s Ring Cycle at Seattle Opera, the company with which she apprenticed after
graduate school. In recent seasons she has performed roles such as Carmen, Komponist, Azucena, and Suzuki with numerous regional companies, sung recitals, worked with composers to create new opera, taught in New York City Opera’s outreach program, and appeared with 1976 Gordon graduate Karin Coonrod’s New York theater company Compagnia de’ Colombari. She is a mezzo-soprano—a dark-hued voice type that sits slightly lower than soprano. Mezzo roles encompass some of the richest characters in opera; she often plays the witch, maid, seductress, or “trouser role”—a young male character, an acting challenge she loves. Last season she took on Romeo in Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi, a setting of Romeo and Juliet, with Houston’s Opera in the Heights; reviewers wrote of her “star performance,” “rich, powerhouse voice” and “perfect balance of power and subtlety.” Sarah and her husband, Peter, a published author, minister, and seminary professor, live in Harlem, not far from the conservatory where she did her graduate work. She says she arrived as well prepared as any of her classmates—thanks to the Gordon Music Department. She remembers being inspired by Gordon’s “Salt and Light Campaign” underway during her time at the College. “There was a focus on being excellent at what you do because it honors God, and shares with the rest of the world the beauty and power of his truth.” She says it inspired her to “be worthy to a wider world.” www.sarahheltzel.com
Michael Messenger ’90
Nonprofit senior leader • Canada Quirky job responsibility: Yearly “polar bear dip”
Michael Messenger is executive vice president and chief operating officer of World Vision Canada, one of the nation’s largest charities. The Christian agency works for children’s wellbeing worldwide through emergency relief, long-term development and advocacy. After Gordon, Michael worked five years in its Toronto and Geneva offices, then left for law school and nine years of legal practice. He rejoined World Vision in 2007 and has been executive VP since 2010. He regularly travels to see the agency’s work around the world, most recently to the Philippines in the immediate aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan. (In photo, he visits in the Philippines with a World Vision staffer and a sponsored child, Rona.) “I’m so grateful that my job brings together my faith, my passion for justice— nurtured during my time at Gordon—and my skills as a leader,” Michael says. He, his wife, Yvonne, and their two teenagers live near Toronto, where he’s involved in his church and serves on community boards (“an occupational hazard of being a recovering lawyer”). He’s training for his first (fund-raising) marathon and this winter led the World Vision team into Lake Ontario for his fifth (fund-raising) New Year’s Day “polar bear dip.” He reports it gets no easier with practice. michael_messenger@worldvision.ca
SPRING 2014 | STILLPOINT 38