Grayson Nesbitt is a young tenor hailing from the national capital region of Canada. For the first few years of his formal education he worked with voice technician and German lied specialist Laurence Ewashko. With Laurence at the University of Ottawa, Grayson received his Bachelor’s Degree in Music and was awarded the Anna-Maria Brancker Schubert Award for Schubert lied performance in the last year of his undergraduate degree. Currently, Grayson is in his second year of study with soprano Jackalyn Short and will recieve his Master of Music degree at the University of Western Ontario, specializing in Vocal Performance and Literature, this coming spring. Grayson was also one of the recipients of the 2017 London Opera Guild Exellence Scholarship this past fall.

 

Recent roles include: Frederic in Gilbert and & Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance with UWOpera, Gherardo in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi with UWOpera last year, Monostatos in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte having been described as “slimy but funny” in the National Capital Opera Society’s Spring 2016 newsletter, Nemorino in Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, Joe Crowell in the Canadian premiere of Ned Rorem’s Our Town during OperaNUOVA’s Vocal Arts Festival of 2015.

              

Grayson was first drawn to music as a child through video game soundtracks. To be able to be taken to another world, or feel a character’s intense emotion amplified through underscoring was astounding to him. He realised that music is an universal experience. The scoring for these games allows for deeper levels of immersion into a fictional world, a character’s mindset or struggle, or sense of adventure. It is this immersion that Grayson tries to bring to every performance. Singers are, after all, story tellers. With advances in data storage technology over the past two decades, video game discs and cartridges have gained the storage space to handle fully orchestrated soundtracks, which is what originally drew Grayson more and more into a classical study of music.

 

Being a story teller, Grayson has always felt that clean diction while singing is paramount. What is the use of singing text if the audience is unable to understand what is being sung? With this in mind, Grayson is diligent in his study of diction for all of the foreign languages he sings, as well as taking care to make sure that even his sung English is crisp and clean. He has even, on occasion, been mistaken as a native speaker of German and Ukrainian, which is a point of pride. Combining his love of learning languages, and his desire to do more obscure repertoire, Grayson is currently studying Japanese art song by composers Yoshinao Nakada and Kunihiko Hashimoto.

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