Peter Shea

Peter W. Shea grew up in Maine, where he sang in his father’s church choirs from the age of five. He comes from a lineage of singers going back at least three generations and has sung professionally as both tenor and baritone since 1972 throughout New England and the Hudson Valley. Peter studied voice with Arthur Koret at the Hartt School, University of Hartford, and with Ralph Griffin at the University of Connecticut, and studies currently with Justina Golden. He has often been a soloist with such groups as Arcadia Players, Hampshire Choral Society, South Hadley Chorale and Brattleboro Concert Choir, and has been featured in numerous music series throughout the region. Peter is also a member of the vocal sextet Cantabile and the chamber choir Brattleboro Camerata. His musical interests include art song and vocal chamber music of all eras, with special emphasis on German lieder. Over the past three decades, Peter has gained recognition for collecting, indexing, analyzing, and performing musical settings of Heine. His passion for uncovering and singing songs based on Heine's poetry began when he was an undergraduate voice major at Hartt in the early 1970s, burgeoned during two sabbaticals while he was a cataloger at the UMass Amherst Libraries, and continues unabated to this day. He retired in 2017 after thirty-four years at UMass, and currently resides with his wife Suzan Smith in Northfield, MA.