![]() ![]() in 1948 to pursue singing and made his recital debut at Town Hall in 1958, his prize for winning the first Joy in Singing competition. Prior to his singing career, he sold toilets for American Standard in Latin America, worked for a whiskey importer in Venezuela, and served as an interpreter of German and French for the U.S. He had a German governess and attended a French school, ultimately acquiring native fluency in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, and Italian along with facility (and the ability to sing and coach song repertoire) in Ladino and Yiddish. Nico Castel was born Naftali Chaim Castel Kalinhoff in Lisbon in 1931 and raised in Venezuela. "We spent long hours on the phone trying to untangle some of the most mysterious meanings of archaic Italian." Castel had a remarkable ability to imitate the accents and inflections of the famous singers he coached and with whom he performed, she said. "I have been honored for 28 years to be an esteemed colleague of Nico Castel, and more importantly his friend," Vocal Arts faculty member Corradina Caporello wrote in an email to The Journal. In 1989, he joined Juilliard's Vocal Arts faculty as a diction coach and also taught a course on the history of singing. A character tenor with a vast repertoire of roles, Castel was also a gifted linguist.
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