Michael Ballam: Utah tenor's career comes full circle

Besides all of the above, he teaches several classes in the music department at Utah State University and serves as the driving force behind the Utah Festival Opera Company, which he founded in 1993 after converting a rundown, 70-year-old Logan theater into a world-class opera and arts palace.

For opera buffs, discovering the UFOC in Logan (population 35,000) is like finding Yankee Stadium in La Verkin. Money Magazine ranked the UFOC among the top 20 summer opera festivals in the world. It is hailed for the quality of its facilities and its productions. More than 20,000 people watched performances at the UFOC last year, most of them from out of state and beyond.

Singers, artists, directors and fans have come from Jerusalem, Australia, Canada, Vienna, Malaysia, Poland, Russia and Serbia to see shows.

The UFOC, Ballam's biggest passion these days, has become the perfect legacy of a man has been obsessed with music, theater, opera and art since he was a boy. But Ballam might still be a full-time performer and there would be no UFOC if fate or providence hadn't lent a hand.

"Before he was a year old, we knew he loved music," says Ballam's mother, Marianne. "He kept wanting to hear it, and as soon as he could talk he would sing."

Ballam's first stage was the top of a table. He sang for a church group at the age of 2 and left them weeping. He was 5 when his grandmother placed him atop another table to sing for her bed-ridden sister in a rest home.

"My grandmother brought her gifts, but I had nothing," he says. "So I sang for her. I remember singing and seeing her weep and smile at the same time. That's confusing to a 5-year-old, because one is joy and one is sadness. But I sensed it was good and right, and I've been pursuing that ever since."

In his mind, Ballam's passion for music came with a cost of isolation. While his peers were listening to the Beatles, he was listening to Sinatra, Crosby, Jane Froman, Beethoven, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hammerstein. He didn't understand pop music — he just didn't get it. She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah? His friends' heroes were the Stones and Mickey Mantle; Ballam's hero was Beethoven.

In his free time he read biographies of composers and mail-ordered opera scores from the local music store. After reading Beethoven's biography in junior high, he bought the nine symphonies of the great composer and listened to them one by one. His love for music grew to include all classical music and opera.

"The first time I heard 'Madame Butterfly' my heart wouldn't stop pounding," he recalls. "I'd play the records and watch the score and imagine what it would look like on stage."

He began taking piano lessons at 6 and voice lessons at 11, the latter because his mother was afraid he would injure his voice with his frequent singing in local productions.