Noah Stewart’s friends made fun of him when he told them what he wanted to do with his life — sing like one of the three tenors and command legendary stages such as Carnegie Hall and London’s Royal Opera House. Now he’s having the last laugh.
With the April release in the UK of his debut album, “Noah,” the 33-year-old Harlem native became the first black artist ever to hit No. 1 on that country’s classical charts. Now that his album has been released here — last week — he’s hoping that his improbable rise will have the same impact in his home country.
Stewart grew up in Harlem with his older sister and his mother, who supported the family as a cashier at the Food Emporium on 90th Street and Broadway. A self-proclaimed “geek with glasses,” he joined the choir as an elective in junior high school because he needed an after-school activity, since his mother didn’t return from work until after 5 p.m.
With this choir, he sang “Moon River” at the Waldorf-Astoria during a tribute to Audrey Hepburn — with Katharine Hepburn in the audience — and immediately knew he wanted to be a performer.
“When the spotlight was on me, I remember feeling this kind of high,” he says. “It was like a drug.”
He embraced opera at LaGuardia High School, but despite the school’s performance orientation and side gigs singing backup for Mariah Carey and Hootie and the Blowfish, his preference for classical singing still pegged him as an outsider.
“My friends at LaGuardia made fun of me,” says Stewart. “They used to call me ‘opera boy,’ because I was obsessed with opera. Everyone around me wanted to become a pop singer.”
With the help of a recommendation from his mentor, legendary African-American soprano Leontyne Price, he followed LaGuardia with Juilliard, and then spent about three years waiting tables, working retail and serving as the receptionist at Carnegie Hall, where he mistakenly thought that someone would hear his voice and magically “discover” him.
“That was the lowest point for me, because it felt like I was so close to music, but so far away,” he says. “I was learning a Russian piece and I was humming the melody, and my supervisor said, ‘Excuse me, Mr. Stewart? What is that noise? Were you just humming?’ I said yeah, and she said, ‘You can’t do that here. It’s very distracting. We can hear you all the way downstairs.’ And I just remember feeling like, ‘Wow. You can’t hum at the biggest musical institution in the world.’ ”
His fortunes turned around three years ago, when his participation in a young artists’ program at the San Francisco Opera led to a series of steady roles with operas around the world, a successful tour of the UK, and a contract with Decca Records.
And yes, he did make it back to Carnegie Hall, in 2009, to perform Mozart’s “Requiem” with conductor John Rutter.
Stewart, whose album includes operatic versions of “Nights in White Satin” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” in addition to more traditional operatic pieces, believes his UK success is at least partly due to his being “a nontraditional opera singer people can relate to,” and hopes that this leads to success in his home country as well.
He’s currently appearing as Radames in “Aida” at the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, NY, through Aug. 25.
“I wanted to do an album that was not traditional opera, because I didn’t want to shut people out,” he says. “Many people who’ve come to see me say, ‘I’ve never been to an opera before, but I love it.’ I want to make opera a people’s art again.”