By Daniel Buckwalter

Well, that’s a box that can be joyously checked off.

For two years, I have waited patiently for an opportunity to write about soprano Taylor Hulett. This happens from time to time. A musician or singer will offer a glimpse of their enormous talent, and I will file it in the “I will get back to you, I promise” folder. Then I wait.

This patience was handsomely rewarded on Nov. 10 in the sanctuary of Central Lutheran Church, when Hulett sang selections from Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to a good-size noontime audience, as part of the Central Lutheran Pocket Concert series.

Organist Lindsey Henriksen Rodgers was the accompanist — she also played a pair of vignettes from Franz Joseph Haydn — and mezzosoprano Alyse Jamieson teamed up with Hulett for Bach’s Wir eilen mit schwachen, doch emsigen Schritten.

The spotlight, though, was on Hulett, a graduate student at the University of Oregon’s  School of Music and Dance.

I first noticed her by accident. It was a Saturday afternoon, and I was walking through the empty sanctuary of Central Lutheran with the associate pastor at the time. Hulett was upstairs in the choir loft rehearsing cantor music for the next morning’s service, with Andrew ElRay Stewart-Cook, the choirmaster at Central.

Her voice stopped me in my tracks. It is a crystal-clear voice that radiates calm and warmth. Further, her body language exudes a serenity that attracts everyone who sees her perform. The performances are not easy work, but Hulett makes it look effortless. You want to stand in her space as she sings.

Hulett has a soft spot for Broadway musicals. She performed the role of Jennifer Rumson in Paint Your Wagon, which had multiple performances at The Shedd Institute in October.

But for this performance, she settled for classical music, and shone brightly with Mozart’s Exsultate, Jubilate, a dense, tricky motet for both the singer and the accompanist.

Michael Clive, a classical music and opera journalist who also serves as the program annotator and writer for the Utah Symphony Orchestra and Utah Opera, has noted that the piece “brings to mind the exhortation from Psalm 100 to make a joyful noise and to come before His presence with singing.”

He adds that “Its ecstatic beauty requires the soprano to negotiate difficult, ornate passages while projecting sheer joy.”

Hulett – and Rodgers – pulled it off with grace. Whatever bumps in the road there were in the run-up to the performance, on Tuesday afternoon it was pitch perfect.
Indeed, as the difficult passages were performed one after another, the grin on Hulett’s face grew wider. She kept her composure, exhaled at the end, and basked in the well-deserved standing ovation.

And I got to check off a box.