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About Melody Wilson,  mezzo-soprano

Melody Wilson has gained recognition as an accomplished artist in the United States and Europe. In 2021-22, she debuts with the San Francisco Symphony, performing a concert of various works including Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody, and with the Oakland Symphony singing Paul Moravec’s Sanctuary Road. Ms. Wilson also makes her role debut with Baltimore Concert Opera singing the Principessa di Bouillon in Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur. In the summer of 2022, Ms. Wilson looks forward to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, Mozart’s Coronation Mass, and Beethoven’s Mass in C in Vienna, Austria.

 

In the 2020-2021 season, Ms. Wilson performed in a world premiere, New Works, Bold Voices Lab at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, which included three newly composed operas. Ms. Wilson performed the roles of Kyra and Son in On the Edge (Karpman) and Janet Armstrong in Moon Tea (Mackey). Her OTSL season also included I Dream a World, the company’s first celebration of Juneteenth. She made company debuts with Indianapolis Opera as Suzuki in Madama Butterfly and with Cincinnati Opera as Mercédès in Carmen, and with the Kalamazoo Symphony in Beethoven’s 9th symphony.

 

In the 2019-20 season, Wilson made her debut with Seattle Opera as Olga in Eugene Onegin, adding a solo recital there. She also performed the mezzo-soprano solo in Paul Moravec’s Sanctuary Road with the Columbus Symphony Orchestra. Ms. Wilson also performed a joint recital with bass Zachary James in Sun Valley, ID in the winter of 2020.

 

In 2017-18, Ms. Wilson performed the role of Addie in Blitzstein’s Regina with Opera Theatre of St. Louis, with Opera News noting, “Melody Wilson’s smoky mezzo-soprano and stately deportment brought depth to Addie.” She performed Fenena in Nabucco and Linda in Lost In The Stars with Union Avenue Opera. In 2016-17, she sang Blumenmädchen in the world premiere of Mondparsifal Alpha 1-8, Jonathan Meese’s adaption of Wagner’s Parsifal under the baton of maestra Simone Young with the Wiener Festwochen and the Berliner Festspiele. The year before, she garnered acclaim as Mrs. Miller in Union Avenue Opera’s production of Doubt, for which she was nominated for the St. Louis Theater Circle Awards in the category “Outstanding achievement in opera,” and she made two important European debuts: in Germany at Theater Bremen, Mrs. Sedley in Peter Grimes and Mercédès in Carmen, and in Hungary at the State Opera Budapest, Maddalena in Rigoletto.

 

No stranger to contemporary repertoire, she has performed in John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles with Opera Delaware (Cherubino), Wexford Opera Festival (Opera Quartet) and Opera Theatre of St. Louis (Opera Quartet). As a Gerdine Young Artist, she also covered Denyce Graves in the role of Emelda in the world premiere of Terence Blanchard’s opera Champion with Opera Theatre of St. Louis. In the standard repertoire she performed Zweite Dame in Die Zauberflöte, Flora in La Traviata, Kate in The Pirates of Penzance and Strawberry Woman in Porgy and Bess, all with Opera Delaware, Mercédès in Carmen; Frau Reich in Die Lustigen Weiber von Windsor and Suzuki (cover) in Madama Butterfly with Opera North; as well as Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Lucretia in The Rape of Lucretia, Sesto in La Clemenza di Tito, Marcellina in Le Nozze di Figaro and Larina in Eugene Onegin at the University of Michigan.

 

Ms. Wilson is also known internationally as a concert soloist and recitalist. She performed Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été with the Slovak State Philharmonic, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra and the Kennett Square Symphony, Haydn’s Theresienmesse with the Wexford Opera Festival Orchestra and Vienna’s Consortium Musicum, as well as Haydn’s Missa in tempore belli and Schubert’s Mass No. 3 in b-flat major, again with the Consortium Musicum. She was a featured soloist in Las voces de Montserrat Caballé in Zaragoza, Spain, and in The Sacred Music of Duke Ellington at the Wilmington Jazz Festival, and has presented solo recitals at the U.S. Embassy in Bratislava, the Weidner Center for the Performing Arts in Wisconsin and the Barocksaal Vienna.

 

Melody Wilson is a five-time recipient of the Jessye Norman Fellowship and a winner of the “Gabriela Beňačková Competition” in Prague (2016) and the “International Czech and Slovak Competition” (2009). She also won 2nd places at the “Irma M. Cooper International Voice Competition” (2014) and the “Annapolis Vocal Competition” (2012). She received awards from the “Austrian American Society of Delaware,” and was one of the winners of the “Kennett Symphony Orchestra Voice Young Artist Competition.” Ms. Wilson holds undergraduate degrees in Music and Spanish from the University of Delaware and a Master of Music and an Artist Diploma from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she studied with Shirley Verrett and George Shirley.

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