At one time you would have been most likely to find David Sadlier behind a drum kit in a heavy metal band, or playing the piano with a jazz band. He’s even done a stint as a firefighter, and spent time as a construction worker. These days he is best known as one of America’s leading dramatic tenors, who has sung around the United States with numerous regional opera companies, as well as making his mark on the concert platform. Somehow he juggles all this with teaching at Christopher Newport University in Virginia, where he is a professor of voice and where his wife Lelia, a concert pianist, is director of keyboard studies.

The couple met in Lelia’s native New Orleans when David was an undergraduate at Loyola University. “Lelia had just returned from finishing her masters at The Julliard School,” he recalls. “She’s a couple of years older than me, but looks ten years younger! I’m kind of humbled by how awesome she is. She was the youngest-ever composer to study with Leonard Bernstein at the Tanglewood Institute, so she was a child prodigy.

“We do a lot of recital work together, which is great, and she performs solo piano as well.”

Now the husband-and-wife duo are about to make their JDP debut with a concert that celebrates three anniversaries – Britten’s centenary, Wagner’s bicentenary and Beethoven’s birthday. Britten and Wagner both feature regularly in David’s performance repertoire – in fact, it was Britten that got him hooked on opera.

“I came to opera singing pretty late in life,” he says. “I got to work on Peter Grimes at university, and I couldn’t believe how much fun it was. It’s amazing music. “The thing that got me involved in it was the connection of text and music. When I sang in Peter Grimes it became clear that the way Britten wrote music, the methods that he chose to put notes and rhythms on the page, are totally drawn from the text. “For me, somebody who came at it not necessarily from a vocal standpoint but from a dramatic standpoint, that was really exciting.” For the JDP recital, David has chosen three songs from Britten’s The Holy Sonnets of John Donne. “They are amazingly powerful and amazingly difficult – I cannot believe how hard they are! They go from angry and defiant to just sublime.”

He will also be performing a couple of arias from Wagner’s Die Walküre, as well as Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, the first German art song cycle.

“We often think of Beethoven as a harmonist and orchestrator, and somebody who’s good with themes, and we sometimes forget about his amazing melodic capabilities. This piece is all of those things. It’s heroic Beethoven, intimate Beethoven, amazing melody, it’s beautiful piano writing – it’s fantastic.

“I’ve performed this a number of times, and it’s one of the pieces that my wife and I feel really connects with us on a deep level. So that’s exciting.”

For some, the most interesting feature of the concert will be the world premiere of a special Britten tribute piece, Two Songs for Benjamin Britten’s Centennial, by John Traill – best known locally as the conductor of the Oxfordshire County Youth Orchestra and head of music at St Anne’s College. “We’ve collaborated before, and John’s a pleasure to work with,” David says. “He’s amazing because he walks this boundary – at times very contemporary and non-traditional, then all of a sudden there’s a clarity in the harmony and in the vocal line. So it’s interesting stuff.“ How does it feel to sing a premiere? “Well, it’s exciting and scary! You feel more of a responsibility. Most of the things I perform I don’t have the composers sitting there looking at me! “But being able to truly shape a piece, and not having people comparing – that’s exciting, for sure.”