“I actually really fell in love with musical theater first,” Hollie-Anne Clark shared. It wasn’t until university that a teacher told her she had a voice for classical, “Let’s see where that goes,” she was advised. Hollie continued her studies majoring in voice and doing a Masters at the Music Conservatoire. “That took me through the classical route, doing a lot of opera. And then I thought, ‘At that moment, actually, you know what, I want to go back and do some musical theater’. I went and studied some musical theater in London. and then revisited opera. So I’ve kind of gone between the two.” The two sides of her voice were always united by the incredible stories. “I love telling stories. I really love getting into a story and characterizing all of my songs, which is why a lot of my videos tend to have sort of some kind of storyboard through them.”
Crossover became an ideal way to bring both her passions together. “I make a lot of my living through singing other styles. I was able to really cross over because I was always interchanging between the styles. So one minute, I’d be singing musical theater in full musical theater voice, and then switching to singing opera. I really liked that element of being able to showcase all those different genres in one but I think that’s where my love for crossover comes from because I can still remain singing with my operatic sound and put that into musical theater, but then also sing musical theater, as you know, in a full musical theater voice.”
Hollie’s debut album “Pure Imagination” is a stunning mix of Broadway, film, Disney, and Christmas favorites. Her lush tone is the consistent thread. Classical Crossover Magazine is especially proud to have been a small note along the journey. “The idea actually came from doing the videos for you guys. Obviously, I released ‘Believe’ last year as one of my Christmas singles and I felt like being involved in so many of your wonderful concerts gave me an opportunity to make a lot of videos. And I said you know what, these need to go on an album. So that’s where the idea came from.”
In a rarity for albums these days, many of the tracks were collaborations live in the studio. “There’s a couple of tracks on my album where I did collaborate with a pianist and we recorded it live. I really like to do that with them in the room and then just try and do it in one take… I don’t like to do things really more than once or twice because I feel like you can then lose the magic of the performance of it. And you know, sometimes it’s nice to have those little flaws, isn’t it? You can really hear its genuine emotion rather than correcting absolutely everything. So I’ll try to step away from it after recording once or twice and say, ‘That’s it, leave it alone’, even if there’s something that I’m not super keen on. I’m just sort of keep the performance.”
Hollie-Anne plans to continue to release more music. “My partner actually writes a lot of his own music. So we keep talking about me doing some songwriting as well. That is definitely something that I would be interested in doing… I’ve got a lot more recording ideas coming up, I want to keep doing more of the classical crossover videos that I do, I really enjoy making them. So that’s something that I’m going to continue with building up in the new year.”
Hollie-Anne also recently established her own opera company, Opera Synergy. “The industry is really a challenging one. Sometimes you have to make your own opportunities to make things happen. I just got to a stage where I felt like, why do I need to wait for somebody else’s permission to do something that I really love? Let’s just create something with people. So we started a fledgling startup company in the summer of this year… it’s really exciting to build something from the start. I hope we can build it and it can become an even bigger project.”
Whatever the outlet, Hollie-Ann just wants to share the gift of music. “That’s something that I haven’t done enough, and I want to start doing more because, you know, it’s one thing doing it, at home, but if you start sharing and putting it out into the world then that’s a really positive thing.”
Stream “Pure Imagination” on Spotify now!
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