By Lloyd Garrison

Jordan Rose Lee is a name increasingly familiar to lovers of choral music in and around Litchfield County. On May 19, she took to the stage in Battell Chapel with a recital tagged “Music is Silly!” after a line from a tongue-in-cheek composition by Leonard Bernstein called “I Hate Music.”

Superbly accompanied by Elizabeth Allyn on the piano, Lee tackled an unusual repertoire that bounced back and forth from the light hearted (“Lydia the Tattooed Lady,” by Richard Arlen, and Aaron Copland’s “I bought Me a Cat”), to works by Rossini and Mozart. Twice she teamed with her friend Julia Babcock, a mezzo-soprano she met when both studied voice at Western Connecticut State University.

Lee admits to standing 5 feet one and a half inches (“Don’t forget to include the half inch.”). But on stage at Battell, her chin up and her emerald green eyes flashing confidence signals with the speed of Morse code, she projected a commanding presence that bore no resemblance to her size. “I know that if you are comfortable on stage,” she says, “your audience will be comfortable with you.”

She can switch roles effortlessly. One moment she was a coquette, or cooed a lullaby, or intoned a somber song set to a poem by Theodore Roethke (“I Wake to sleep and take my waking slow”). Whatever she did that Saturday afternoon at Battell, the crowd loved it.

Neither show business nor classical music was part of her growing up. She was born in Texas and between the ages of five and nine lived in Suriname, where her father was a Baptist missionary. When her parents divorced, she found herself living with her mother in Litchfield, where she performed in high school plays and musicals, made All-New England Choir and began studying voice with Laura Mashburn, who remains her voice coach.

Maintaining consistent voice lessons doesn’t come easily. Her husband, Roger Johnson, is a caretaker at White Memorial Conservation Center in Litchfield and crafts custom signs and wooden toys on the side. Lee is a stay at home mom, raises two young children, plus 12 hens, a rooster and Spider, a puppy of unknown lineage. The eggs, which are huge, are for sale beside the letter box for $3.50 a dozen.
If you slow down at what used to be South Norfolk’s little red schoolhouse on Route 272, you may well hear her hitting the high notes of Franz Schubert’s “Auf dem Sprom,” (“On the River”), which she will sing in a recital Aug. 25 at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, Conn. She is a regular there. She also is a member of Gaudeamus and often solos at concerts with Crescendo in Great Barrington.
She prefers intimate settings “where the architecture assists my voice.” And her voice, she concedes, “is not big enough to fill a large space.” So opera may not be a career option. But she described her concert at Battell as “a blast,” and hopes to line up a few more. Judging by the audience’s demand for encores, she should have a very short wait.