Andrew René Wins Heafner-Williams Vocal Competition

LINCOLNTON, N.C.––It was a hard decision.

That’s how Carolyn Heafner of Lincolnton, veteran opera star and organizer of the namesake Heafner-Williams Vocal Competition, put it Monday. But now the results are in for this past weekend’s annual competition, and the first-prize winner was baritone Andrew René.            

Tenor James Smidt took home second-place honors, and third place was a tie between mezzo-soprano Kathleen Felty and baritone Adrian Smith. Baritone Edward Bland and Lincoln County’s own Alexandria McNeely received encouragement grants.

“It was a tough one to call, with all the talent we had,” Heafner said. “The semi-finals were sensational. We could have had another six from that group––there were 17 in all––to have a totally different second set of finals! The judges were having a hard time with decisions but judged wisely and fairly. It was an unusual final round, in that we had four men and two women. We had the largest number of men ever. It makes things very interesting, that it is never the same from one year to the next.”

René, Smidt and Felty are all affiliated with the North Carolina School of the Arts and its A.J. Fletcher Opera Institute in Winston-Salem. McNeely, Smith and Bland are veterans of the vocal performance school at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory.

René has participated in numerous vocal competitions and professional engagements, including performances with the Virginia Opera Association, the Bay View Music Festival, Opera Raw, Piedmont Opera, the Fletcher Opera Institute and the Princeton Festival. This year, he will play Sam in Trouble in Tahiti, Dandini in La Cenerentola and Golaud in Impressions de Pelléas.

The summer of 2015 marked René’s third year at the Bay View Music Festival, where he performed the rôle of Marcello in their production of Puccini's La Bohème. In the summer of 2017, he returned to perform as Escamillo in Carmen. His previous rôles include John Sorel in Menotti’s The Consul, the Pirate King in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance, Guglielmo in Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Riolobo in Catàn’s Florencia en el Amazonas, Harlequin in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos and the title rôle in Verdi’s Falstaff.

René recently earned his undergraduate degree from Capital University, where he studied with Élise DesChamps and Brian Banion. The baritone is pursuing a master of music degree at the Fletcher Opera Institute.