You can take the farm boy out of Kansas, but you can’t take Kansas out of the farm boy — even when he’s a principal soloist with the New York City Opera, based in Lincoln Center, with almost 1,500 performances of more than 100 different operatic parts to his credit since the 1980s.

Under the veneer of sophistication and worldliness, David Corman remains a rural Kansan at heart.

“I like the no-nonsense people (of the state). There’s a toughness about Kansans that I like,” says Corman, 42. “And I like the Westernness of it. I love the Flint Hills, the prairie, the openness.”

Corman — a native of Minneapolis, a town of about 3,000 people located near Salina — will play Don Jose in Teatro Lirico D’Europa’s new production of Georges Bizet’s classic opera “Carmen” today at the Lied Center.

Don Jose is the leading tenor role in “Carmen,” set in 19th-century Seville, Spain. It has become one of the best-known and most popular of all operas. It is considered by many opera lovers to be Bizet’s greatest work.

Corman, who moved with his wife, Kimberly, and their three young sons to Odessa, Texas, last August, still has deep roots in Kansas.

All of his five siblings live in his native state.

“One of them is a rancher near Minneapolis, and I grew up farming and ranching with him and my father. My father was a lawyer, but he owned farms, and so we grew up farming. I rode a lot of tractors growing up,” says Corman, in a telephone interview from his Odessa home.

He also has a brother who’s a Methodist minister near Minneapolis; a sister who’s the principal English horn player for the Wichita Symphony; another brother who teaches English at Wichita Heights High School; and another sister who is the alumni director at Kansas Wesleyan University in Salina.

Teatro Lirico D'Europa will present Georges Bizet's classic opera Carmen at 7:30 tonight at the Lied Center.

Influenced by pianist mother

Corman’s early years foreshadowed his future career as an opera singer.

As a youngster, he was immersed in a small-town household that was filled with music.

“My two oldest brothers had a rock band in the late ’60s and traveled around doing rock ‘n’ roll. But my mother was probably the greatest influence on my musical life. She was a fantastic pianist, so I heard a lot of classical music,” he says.

“Our lullaby as we were going to sleep would be a Franz Liszt etude or a Mozart sonata. She would play into the night.”

His mother, Elinor Corman, died two years ago. In addition to raising six children with her husband, Evan Corman, she taught piano.

“She started playing some professionally, late in her life, with me. We did a lot of concerts together in the Kansas area. In fact, she played at the Lied Center when I was at Yale (University). The Metropolitan Opera competition was at the Lied Center one year, and she played for me,” Corman says.

He graduated from high school in Minneapolis in 1980 then attended Friends University in Wichita, where he earned double bachelor’s degrees in music and literature. Corman graduated from college in 1984.

He then went to Yale University, where he earned a master’s in music in 1987.

From there, Corman went on to the Juilliard School in New York City, where he was chosen to participate in the Julliard Opera Center, a haven for post-graduate singers from around the world.

On a whim, he auditioned in New York for the Zurich Opera House in Switzerland, hoping to land one of about 20 spots for young singers in the International Opera Studio there.

Corman was selected, and he and his wife moved to Zurich, where they lived from 1991 to 1996. That’s where he made his debut as an operatic tenor, launching his current career.

Tenor David Corman, center, in clown suit, performs the lead role in a 1998 Piedmont Opera Company production of the Italian classic opera, Pagliacci, in Winston-Salem, N.C.

Opera veteran

After five years of living abroad, Kansas beckoned Corman.

In 1996, the Cormans moved from Zurich to his hometown of Minneapolis, where they stayed until August 2004, when they moved to Odessa to be nearer to his wife’s family.

Making his home in Minneapolis those eight years didn’t pose a problem to a successful career as an opera singer.

“I have an agent in New York, and I do auditions in New York or wherever. My jobs are all over the place, and so it doesn’t really matter where you live,” Corman says.

He has performed leading tenor roles with many major operas, including the Boston Lyric Opera, the Lyric Opera of Kansas City and the Gothenburg Opera in Sweden.

Corman also has performed as a concert soloist with the New York Philharmonic under conductor Kurt Mazur.

He recently received the State of Kansas Award for Musician of the Year from the National Federation of Music Clubs.

Corman is no stranger to the role of Don Jose.

“I’ve been in probably six or seven productions of ‘Carmen’ and about 30 performances (in the role of the Spanish officer),” he says.

“But over my career, I’m coming up on 1,500 performances of more than 100 different parts since the 1980s.”

Corman says it’s not all that unusual for a Kansan like himself to excel in opera.

“Kansas has a real strong music tradition,” he says. “The greatest opera singer from Kansas is a man named Sam Ramey, whose career is now in the twilight. He’s from Colby, and he’s the most recorded bass of all time. It doesn’t matter where you come from, in that sense.”