‘We called each other hermanas’: Colleagues remember beloved UMass voice professor, Paulina Stark

Paulina Stark, a professor emerita of voice at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1985 to 2005, died earlier this month at the age of 88.

“She was an amazing woman,” said Estela Olevsky, a professor emerita of piano at UMass who was also a close longtime friend of Stark. “She could handle so many things at the same time, and she loved teaching – absolutely adored teaching.”

Born to American parents in Colombia, Stark, the youngest of three siblings, moved to Texas with her family when she was a toddler. Her son, Philip Stark, said that his mom sang from a very young age, including performing in choirs. She began college at Rice University at the age of 16 and went on to graduate Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude in 1957 with a degree in romance languages, but she did her junior year at Smith College and toured Europe with the Smith College Singers. After graduation, she went on to complete a master’s degree in French literature. She did extensive post-graduate studies at the University of Texas-Austin Butler School of Music and the University of Houston Moores School of Music.

Her roles at the Houston Grand Opera included Lauretta in “Gianni Schicchi” in 1958, Gilda in “Rigoletto” in 1958, Micaela in “Carmen” in 1960, “Antonia” in “The Tales of Hoffman” in 1961, among others, according to the Opera’s archives, and she performed a number of solos with the Houston Symphony Chorale (now known as the Houston Symphony Chorus). A 1972 Houston Post review of Haydn’s “The Creation,” said, “Miss Stark brought a gleaming, fresh voice to her assignments, delivering her English words with careful diction, her tones warm and expressive. There were beautiful passages indeed when she called forth the creation of the various birds — the eagle, the lark, the nightingale. Her trills and modest ornamentations were perfect and never strained in arias about the flowers, and the birds and her exchanges with Adam.”

“Miss Stark,” the review added, “concertized now widely, has developed winningly and is an asset to the city’s musical community.”

While working on a professional music career, Stark was also a mother and homemaker. Her son Philip said, “It’s really remarkable that she was able to accomplish as much professionally as she did while devoting so much time to family and household.” She taught voice students in her house, which meant that Philip and his brothers were around music often.

“She had an amazing career,” Philip said, “but from my perspective, she was Mom.”

As it happens, many records from Stark’s Houston days, including college yearbooks and newspaper clippings, refer to her as “Pauline,” not “Paulina.” Olevsky attributes this to a likelihood that people there simply got her name wrong, as often happens to Olevsky herself – people call her “Stella” rather than “Estela.”

In any case, Olevsky said of her friend, “She was always Paulina.”

In 1973, Stark made her New York City debut at what’s now known as Weill Recital Hall, an intimate performance venue within Carnegie Hall, and a New York Times critic praised her “theatrical flair” and “handsome stage presence.”

Her career accomplishments also included performances with the professional orchestras of Monte Carlo, Jerusalem, Dallas, Syracuse, and Manchester, England, as well as appearances on major TV and radio networks. As an educator, she also worked at New England Conservatory and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

When she joined the UMass faculty in 1985, she met Estela Olevsky, with whom she connected immediately because of their shared interest in Latin American music and because they were both native Spanish speakers. (Olevsky is originally from Argentina.) Olevsky spoke fondly of Stark’s musical fluency, her mastery of the French language, her “extraordinary memory,” and the way that she “gave her 100% all to music” as a performer.

Overall, she said, her friendship with Stark was “the best all-around relationship with a colleague one could possibly have.”

“I have played with many soloists – singers, string players, wind players – but hers was a very different relationship,” she said. “Honestly, we called each other ‘hermanas.’” (The word means “sisters” in Spanish.)

The two became a performing duo, playing shows at UMass and around the country, with Stark on vocals and Olevsky on piano. (She prefers to use the term “assistant pianist” rather than “accompanist” in part because it reflects their personal connection – how they assisted each other in times of trouble.)

Olevsky recalled a trip to record music in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, funded by a grant from UMass. During the trip, Stark received tragic personal news, but didn’t let it stop her from performing, which impressed Olevsky.

“Those were the moments where she could just have this clear mind,” she said. “[At] the microphone or recording or in front of the audience, she was altogether there.”

One of the students on whom Stark had a profound impact was Andrew Garland, an accomplished baritone who now teaches voice at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In a Facebook post, Garland said that Stark was “a nurturer” who “gave so much of herself for us voice students” but also “took no nonsense.” Stark’s studio class was his favorite: “Imagine wanting to stay in class on a Friday afternoon!”

“[W]hen she was on stage,” he wrote, “you felt her whole person talking to you, feeling what she is feeling. From her I got the need to do the same.”

Another of her UMass colleagues, music professor and composer Salvatore Macchia, said Stark was “a very, very giving and dedicated colleague” who “did her best to make all of her students and all of her colleagues feel really quite at home, welcome, and really part of the community.”

“She was a very active and very positive force,” he said. “Her attitude about being able to bring joy, light, happiness into music-making, into teaching, into being a colleague, I think was very infectious and very powerful.”

Macchia said that one of Stark’s strengths as a teacher was her ability to give students feedback, to “criticize them, tell them what they needed to know, without ever making them feel that they were not worthy.”

“She was really good at making the student un der stand that the criticisms were about today forming a path to tomorrow,” he said.

That sense of “forming a path to tomorrow” is apt in another sense, too. By educating students like Garland, who now work as educators themselves, Stark was helping to create generations of musicians who will benefit from her passion and skill, making an ongoing legacy for herself and the school. As Macchia put it, “Each one of those students is going to carry some of Paulina and some of UMass.”

Stark is preceded in death by her husband, Herbert, and is survived by three sons, Philip, Jonathan and David.

Carolyn Brown can be reached at [email protected].