“I just discovered I could make noises and they fit with what everybody was doing,” said Carrie Hennessey, laughing. She was reminiscing about being the youngest of eight children, and tagging along to her mother’s Lutheran choir rehearsals after her father died. Singing was how she found her footing. It still is, except she no longer tries to fit in, at least not into a specific genre.
“Yesterday, I could have been singing jazz or screaming heavy metal,” she said. “And today I get to do opera, and I don’t have to fit myself in a box. And I get to sort of let that joy, that pure, pure, unadulterated joy for music making come back into the rehearsal space.”
A Sacramento-based soprano singer, Hennessey has performed with the Grand Rapids Symphony, the Pacific Symphony, the Houston Symphony and in concert halls from the Concertgebouw in Bruges to the Rudolfinum in Prague. She has captivated audiences through opera performances, and also in musical theater and cabaret. She’s made audiences at the Sacramento Ballet burst into surprised belly laughter, then leap to their feet. And while her technique is top-notch (The San Francisco Chronicle praised her “wondrous blend of silvery tone and sinuous phrasing”), it’s the emotional depth she brings to her performances that connects with audiences and leads them through a stunningly diverse range of feelings. The Fresno Bee wrote that her Blanche DuBois “let us burrow into her character’s soul, even into the darkest crevices.”
Hennessey is also a vocal teacher, a trauma-informed facilitator, and a co-founder of Rogue Music Project, a Sacramento-based performance collective determined to reinvent what a night at the opera can feel like. And she is, by her own description, someone who has had to find her way back to her voice after losing it entirely.
Finding her way back
There was a period in Hennessey’s life when singing left her. The cause was trauma — a sexual assault by a trusted fellow musician — and its effect on her instrument was profound. Opera singing demands access to the whole body: the breath, the diaphragm, the pelvic floor. Those were precisely the parts of herself she had closed off.
“My body was inaccessible,” she said simply. “I couldn’t feel myself. I couldn’t feel my breath.”
What brought her back wasn’t technique — it was somatic work: the slow process of relearning how to inhabit her own body. The discovery changed not only how she sang, but what she understood singing to be for.
Today, that understanding shapes everything she does — onstage, in the teaching studio, and in the rehearsal room. Rather than hiding behind a character, she routes the character’s emotions through her own lived experience.
“Anyone who ever sees me perform actually gets a full biography of what I’ve gone through in my life,” she said. “They just don’t know it, because I’m telling it through a different story.”
Expressing fully without being judged
Hennessey talks about opera the way most people talk about therapy — as a way of tapping into and expressing feelings that may not be considered conventionally appropriate for women to express. “Being on stage is where we can really express fully without being judged, without being dampened down. And I think that’s why opera so appealed to me. In opera, there’s a range of emotion that is not only acceptable but encouraged to fully express.”
She wants audiences to experience these feelings too, even if it’s uncomfortable. Her advice to first-time opera goers is characteristically direct: “Be open to being okay with not liking everything. Because that tells you something.” If a performance unsettles you, she suggests, that’s not a flaw in the art — it’s the art working.
Rogue by design
In 2017, Hennessey and a group of like-minded musicians founded Rogue Music Project (RMP) with a simple, subversive goal: to make audiences forget they’re at a concert. RMP blends opera, classical music, musical theater, and classic rock, staging cabarets and 10-minute operas — sometimes in loops, so audiences can wander in and out and experience them multiple times. The point is never passive consumption.
“We want them to go, what? Is this what I’m hearing?” she said. “We want a little bit of disjunct — wrestle in your seats a little. Unexpected something or other.”
Hennessey joins fellow RMP members Omari Tau (co-founder of RMP), pianist Jennifer Reason (whose voice is familiar to CapRadio listeners), bari-tenor Kevin Doherty, and mezzo-soprano Sarah Fitch for Dessert in the Garden with Rogue Music Project on July 11 at a private home in Grass Valley. But that event is still weeks away. First, there’s Pagliacci.
A performance with zing
On June 24, Hennessey performs in Music in the Mountains’ production of Pagliacci — Leoncavallo’s compact, gutting opera about a traveling clown whose performance of jealousy becomes terrifyingly real. It runs just eighty minutes, but the emotional impact lasts much longer. “It’s going to be spicy,” said Hennessey. “It’s going to have some extra zing to it.”
She’ll share the stage with Sal Atti, Bob Balonek, Jon Saatman, and Matthew Peterson, under the baton of Music in the Mountains Artistic Director Ryan Murray.
Nevada County is special to Hennessey. “I’ve had the opportunity to explore every facet of my artistry in Grass Valley,” she said. “That community in particular has really supported, encouraged, and enlightened the pathway for me over the last decade and a half. It’s one of my spectacularly integrated artistic homes.”
—Pagliacci is happening Wednesday, June 24 at 7p.m. at the Center for the Arts in Grass Valley as part of Music in the Mountains’ SummerFest concert series. Rogue Music Project’s Dessert in the Garden follows on Saturday, July 11 at 5:30p.m. Tickets and information at musicinthemountains.org. Follow Carrie Hennessey at @carriehennessey or visit carriehennessey.com.