East Village Opera Company
Tyley Ross and Peter Kiesewalter, Principals of The East Village Opera Company
Ottawa, Canada natives Tyley Ross and Peter Kiesewalter bring decades of eclectic musical experience to their groundbreaking new project, the East Village Opera Company (EVOC).
Tyley Ross has been performing since his early teens as a street busker, a cartoon voice-over specialist, an actor, and a professional singer-songwriter with two solo albums to his credit. He was hand picked by Pete Townshend to play the title character in the Canadian production of The Who’s Tommy, and later starred in Miss Saigon on Broadway. As the lead voice of EVOC, Ross’s controlled power and emotional commitment reflect the early influences of impassioned and iconic singers from both the worlds of opera and pop/rock.
Peter Kiesewalter began piano lessons with his dad at age six, and was a professional musician by the time he graduated high school in 1986. He earned a classical performance degree in clarinet from Ottawa University (with a minor in jazz saxophone) while working in a dizzying array of musical contexts as a keyboardist and reed player.
“The great thing about a small city like Ottawa,” Peter explains, “is that in order to make a living playing music, you had to be very flexible.” He worked as a sideman with numerous Canadian singer-songwriters (Jane Siberry, Lynn Miles), house keyboard player at a country music studio, contributing member of a Celtic fusion band and original jump jive project, orchestra pit musician, Aquarius/EMI recording band Fat Man Waving, and leader of his own world music outfit the Angstones.
That flexibility came in handy when Kiesewalter moved to New York in 1997 to act as musical director of The Bottom Line’s Downtown Messiah, a Manhattan seasonal presentation that recasts Handel's oratorio as a setting for pop-music performers. Kiesewalter was working as a house composer at ABC-TV in 2001 when he was approached to create contemporary settings of traditional arias for Kiss of Debt — a Canadian film starring Tyley Ross as an aspiring opera singer under the thumb of a crime boss.
“Peter agreed to do one song, initially,” says Tyley Ross, “but we had such a good time that we quickly recorded 15 songs” with a 20-person musical cast that included guitarist Vernon Reid (Living Colour) and bluegrass banjo master Tony Trishka. After sitting on the mixes for two years, they finally decided in 2003 to master and self-release the first EVOC album, La Donna. The album featured brash, inventive treatments of operatic arias and Neapolitan folk songs - "Vesti la Giubba," "La Donna é Mobile," "Ave Maria" — interpreted as everything from disco to bossa nova to stadium-strength rock.
In March 2004, the East Village Opera Company appeared at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan for what its founders thought might be the group’s first and last live show. “We played one show to maybe 80 people,” Ross recalls, “but among them were a number of record business folks and media types. The reaction was unbelievable — from that one show, we had national press virtually overnight.” “What was meant to be our last show became our first show. Joe’s Pub had a cancellation two weeks later, brought us back to fill in — and within a couple months, we were selling the place out. Within a year, we had signed a deal with Universal Classics.”
Ottawa, Canada natives Tyley Ross and Peter Kiesewalter bring decades of eclectic musical experience to their groundbreaking new project, the East Village Opera Company (EVOC).
Tyley Ross has been performing since his early teens as a street busker, a cartoon voice-over specialist, an actor, and a professional singer-songwriter with two solo albums to his credit. He was hand picked by Pete Townshend to play the title character in the Canadian production of The Who’s Tommy, and later starred in Miss Saigon on Broadway. As the lead voice of EVOC, Ross’s controlled power and emotional commitment reflect the early influences of impassioned and iconic singers from both the worlds of opera and pop/rock.
Peter Kiesewalter began piano lessons with his dad at age six, and was a professional musician by the time he graduated high school in 1986. He earned a classical performance degree in clarinet from Ottawa University (with a minor in jazz saxophone) while working in a dizzying array of musical contexts as a keyboardist and reed player.
“The great thing about a small city like Ottawa,” Peter explains, “is that in order to make a living playing music, you had to be very flexible.” He worked as a sideman with numerous Canadian singer-songwriters (Jane Siberry, Lynn Miles), house keyboard player at a country music studio, contributing member of a Celtic fusion band and original jump jive project, orchestra pit musician, Aquarius/EMI recording band Fat Man Waving, and leader of his own world music outfit the Angstones.
That flexibility came in handy when Kiesewalter moved to New York in 1997 to act as musical director of The Bottom Line’s Downtown Messiah, a Manhattan seasonal presentation that recasts Handel's oratorio as a setting for pop-music performers. Kiesewalter was working as a house composer at ABC-TV in 2001 when he was approached to create contemporary settings of traditional arias for Kiss of Debt — a Canadian film starring Tyley Ross as an aspiring opera singer under the thumb of a crime boss.
“Peter agreed to do one song, initially,” says Tyley Ross, “but we had such a good time that we quickly recorded 15 songs” with a 20-person musical cast that included guitarist Vernon Reid (Living Colour) and bluegrass banjo master Tony Trishka. After sitting on the mixes for two years, they finally decided in 2003 to master and self-release the first EVOC album, La Donna. The album featured brash, inventive treatments of operatic arias and Neapolitan folk songs - "Vesti la Giubba," "La Donna é Mobile," "Ave Maria" — interpreted as everything from disco to bossa nova to stadium-strength rock.
In March 2004, the East Village Opera Company appeared at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan for what its founders thought might be the group’s first and last live show. “We played one show to maybe 80 people,” Ross recalls, “but among them were a number of record business folks and media types. The reaction was unbelievable — from that one show, we had national press virtually overnight.” “What was meant to be our last show became our first show. Joe’s Pub had a cancellation two weeks later, brought us back to fill in — and within a couple months, we were selling the place out. Within a year, we had signed a deal with Universal Classics.”
