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Handled with Care
Dolora Zajick and the Institute for Young Dramatic Voices

by Brian Manternach

At the age of 12, Samantha Friedman had a startling conversation with her choir director. “Samantha,” he said, “your voice is so big, I think you’re going to ruin it in a few years.”

Now a 19-year-old aspiring opera singer, Friedman vividly recalls the conversation. “I was devastated,” she remembers, “I did not know what to think!” Despite the protestations of her voice teacher at the time, the pointed comments continued to stay with her. “I never knew what was wrong with my voice,” Friedman said. “I always thought I was stupid or behind because I had been studying voice many years longer than a lot of people and they seemed just farther ahead of me.”

These experiences, among others, have caused her to seek a different kind of instruction and an approach that works with, rather than against, the natural attributes of her voice. For the past three summers she has found that instruction in the mountain town of Orem, Utah, 40 miles south of Salt Lake City, at the summer home of the ...

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