Wanda Brister (born August 12, 1957) is an American operatic mezzo-soprano and voice teacher.
Born in Houma, Louisiana, she has appeared throughout the Americas, Europe, and South America. She matriculated at Loyola University of the South, studying with Patricia Brooks Etienne (Havranek). It was here she made her unofficial debut in 1978 as Maddalena in act 4 of Rigoletto , opposite Anthony Laciura as the Duke of Mantua. Two years later, she sang the Zia Principessa in Suor Angelica at Loyola. She holds degrees from the University of Southern Mississippi and the University of Louisiana, Lafayette where she worked with Patrick Shelby, a student of Andrew White and Sidney Dietch.
She served as an apprentice at the New Orleans Opera Association (where she made her professional debut in 1981 as Mistress Benson in Lakmé ) before attending the Academy of Vocal Arts, Philadelphia, where she then was an apprentice with the Opera Company of Philadelphia. After several years of work as a professional singer and beginning her life as a university professor, she pursued and completed a Doctor of Musical Arts degree at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she studied with renowned vocal repertoire scholar Carol Kimball. Her dissertation topic was entitled "The Songs of Madeleine Dring: Organizing a Posthumous Legacy."
Brister studied under Nell Rankin from 1984-1990, a 24-year veteran of the Metropolitan Opera who had studied with Madame Jeanne Lorraine, a student of Manuel Garcia II. Brister also worked with Beverly Wolff, who spent many years at New York City Opera, San Francisco Opera, Dallas, and all of the major symphony orchestras in the United States. Among others, Beverly had been a student of Sidney Dietch and Lila Edwards. Brister coached with Enrico Di Giuseppe, a tenor from the Metropolitan Opera in the early 1990s. She appeared with the Opera Orchestra of New York, Opera Company of Philadelphia, Baltimore Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, New York Opera Ensemble, Annapolis Opera, Pittsburgh Opera Theater, Connecticut Grand Opera, New England Lyric Operetta, Jefferson Performing Arts Society, Lyric Opera of Waco, Shreveport Opera, etc., and orchestras in New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Louisiana, Florida, Arizona, West Virginia, and New Hampshire. She has sung over 200 recitals in 43 states and brought this literature to festivals in Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, England, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine.
She has made several recordings including: Strauss Waltzes for Singing, (Arabesque with New York Vocal Arts Ensemble), Clarikinetics; Landscapes I: The Music of Daniel Baldwin; Landscapes II; Vocalise: Music for Voice, Bassoon, and Piano; (all on Mark Records). Her solo discs include: The Songs of Madeleine Dring with tenor Stanford Olsen, and Le premier matin du monde, In 2015 she recorded 17 pieces entitled "Cabaret Songs of Madeleine Dring" with Courtney Kenny (2018), and another 30 pieces in 2016 "Madeleine Dring: Lady Composer" (2022). All of these discs are available from Cambria Music.
She has appeared as soloist at Carnegie Hall on seven occasions, and has sung under the batons of Krzysztof Penderecki, Michael Tilson Thomas, John Rutter, John Nelson (conductor), Philippe Entremont, Arthur Fagen, Chris Nance, Leopold Hager, Gianfranco Masini, and Eve Queler. She has performed over 200 times with orchestra, including over 100 operatic performances. She has participated in choral ensembles with Michael Korn, Erich Leinsdorf, and Lorin Maazel.
From 1986 to 1988, she was a member of the quartet New York Vocal Arts Ensemble and continued to work with that ensemble on occasion through 1996. Together with this group she traveled throughout the United States, and appeared in concerts for the Government's Concert Agency (GOSConcert) in the former Soviet Union and in other "Eastern Bloc" countries from 1988-1992. She has sung throughout the North Atlantic with this quartet with Cunard Cruise lines as well as a solo tour of the American west coast with Epirotiki.
She has taught at Baylor University (1999-2000), the University of Arizona (2000-2003), and the Florida State University (2003–2024). She has appeared at festivals including Steinfurt (Germany) Festival, Schwetzingen (Germany) Festival, Varna (Bulgaria) Fest, the IV International Festival of Winds in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as well as in concerts for the International Double Reed Society in Ithaca, New York, Birmingham, England, and Norman, Oklahoma.
Brister sang Mistress Benson (Lakmé) again in 2006 with the Opera Orchestra of New York, 25 years after her professional debut in the same part. She continued to appear in recitals and concerts until it became difficult to sing as the result of a lung disease sarcoidosis. She is recently (2024)received a double lung transplant at University of Florida Pulmonary Hospital. She offers lectures to pedagogy classes on this topic as well as being a good will ambassador for transplants and sarcoidosis. Brister's students sing at companies throughout the United States and Europe and many have faculty positions in American, European, and Chinese universities.
She was a teaching intern with the National Association of Teachers of Singing under the acclaimed vocal pedagogue, James McKinney, and has published articles with the Journal of Singing. (See Josef Szulc, Jean Cras, Madeleine Dring. She has also published about auditioning for college programs for Florida MTNA and submitted articles to the International Alliance for Women in Music, for which she served as a Member of the Board of Directors, and has been published in the Light Music Society Journal of Great Britain. She won an award from that society for her 2018 release of Madeleine Dring Cabaret Songs. She has also received positive reviews for her recordings in the Journal of Singing and the International Double Reed Society Journal, as well as the Journal of the Light Music Society. Her recent book, Madeleine Dring: Lady Composer(Clemson University Press, Liverpool University Press, Oxford University Press, 2020, received positive reviews from Graham Johnson, Joseph Horovitz, Carol Kimball, the International Double Reed Society Journal, the British Double Reed Society, the NATS Journal of Singing, and journals of the Kapralova Society, the Light Music Society, and the International Alliance for Women in Music.
She was faculty artist for the Orfeo Music Festival in Vipiteno, Italy from 2010-2015, and was artist faculty of the Schlern International Music Festival (2006-2009). In 2013 she presented on Madeleine Dring to the International Congress of Voice Teachers in Brisbane, Australia. She has also presented for the National Association of Teachers of Singing national conference in Las Vegas and the Music by Women Festival in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2022 as well as the Women Composers Festival of Hartford of 2019. Brister compiled and edited a series of 10 scores published by Classical Vocal Reprints. Madeleine Dring's only opera Cupboard Love as well as 9 volumes of the previously unavailable vocal music were published are in this series. Faculty biography. Retrieved 4 June 2018.</ref> [1]
Renée Lynn Fleming is an American soprano and actress, known for performances in opera, concerts, recordings, theater, film, and at major public occasions. A recipient of the National Medal of Arts, Fleming has been nominated for 18 Grammy Awards and has won five times. In June 2023, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts announced that Fleming would be one of the five artists recognized at the 2023 Kennedy Center Honors, which she received in December 2023. Other notable honors won by Fleming have included the Crystal Award from the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur from the French government, Germany's Cross of the Order of Merit, Sweden's Polar Music Prize and honorary membership in England's Royal Academy of Music. Unusual among artists whose careers began in opera, Fleming has achieved name recognition beyond the classical music world. In May 2023, Fleming was appointed by the World Health Organization as a Goodwill Ambassador for Arts and Health. On April 9, 2024, Penguin Random House published Fleming's anthology Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness, a collection of essays about the health benefits of music and the arts, by scientists from leading research institutions, practitioners, educators, arts leaders, musicians, artists and writers.
David Conte is an American composer who has written over 150 works published by E.C. Schirmer, including six operas, a musical, works for chorus, solo voice, orchestra, chamber music, organ, piano, guitar, and harp. Conte has received commissions from Chanticleer, the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, Harvard University Chorus, the Men’s Glee Clubs of Cornell University and the University of Notre Dame, GALA Choruses from the cities of San Francisco, New York, Boston, Atlanta, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., the Dayton Philharmonic, the Oakland Symphony, the Stockton Symphony, the Atlantic Classical Orchestra, the American Guild of Organists, Sonoma City Opera, and the Gerbode Foundation. He was honored with the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) Brock Commission in 2007 for his work The Nine Muses, and in 2016 he won the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) Art Song Composition Award for his work American Death Ballads.
Dawn Upshaw is an American soprano. She is the recipient of several Grammy Awards and has released a number of Edison Award-winning discs; she performs both opera and art song, and her repertoire spans Baroque to contemporary. Many composers, including Henri Dutilleux, Osvaldo Golijov, John Harbison, Esa-Pekka Salonen, John Adams, and Kaija Saariaho, have written for her. In 2007, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.
Phyllis Curtin was an American soprano and academic teacher who had an active career in operas and concerts from the early 1950s through the 1980s. She is known for her creation of roles in operas by Carlisle Floyd, such as the title role in Susannah and Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights. She was a dedicated song recitalist, who retired from singing in 1984. She was named Boston University's Dean Emerita, College of Fine Arts in 1991.
Jane Eaglen is an English dramatic soprano particularly known for her interpretations of the works of Richard Wagner and the title roles in Bellini's Norma and Puccini's Turandot. Her career at the Metropolitan Opera started with her Brunhilde in the Ring Cycle. Eaglen has performed at all major houses globally such as La Scalla, the Metropolitan Opera House and many others. She currently resides in Boston, MA as a voice teacher at the famous New England Conservatory where she is training the next generation of world class singers. She is the President and founder of the Boston Wagner Society. Eaglen spends her summers instructing at the prestigious Merola opera training program for emerging artists. She is very active in her community. Every year she judges several voice competitions including the Laffont-Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions.
Madeleine Winefride Isabelle Dring was an English composer, pianist, singer and actress.
Karen Holvik is an American classical soprano and voice teacher.
Sylvia McNair is an American opera singer and classical recitalist who has also achieved notable success in the Broadway and cabaret genres. McNair, a soprano, has made several critically acclaimed recordings and has won two Grammy Awards.
Tina Davidson is an American composer.
Madeleine Louise Mitchell MMus, ARCM, GRSM, FRSA is a British violinist who has performed as a soloist and chamber musician in over forty countries. She has a wide repertoire and is particularly known for commissioning and premiering new works and for promoting British music in concert and on disc.
Matthew Hoch is an American academic and teacher of singing.
Beverly Wolff was an American mezzo-soprano who had an active career in concerts and operas from the early 1950s to the early 1980s. She performed a broad repertoire which encompassed operatic and concert works in many languages and from a variety of musical periods. She was a champion of new works, notably premiering compositions by Leonard Bernstein, Gian Carlo Menotti, Douglas Moore, and Ned Rorem among other American composers. She also performed in a number of rarely heard baroque operas by George Frideric Handel with the New York City Opera (NYCO), the Handel Society of New York, and at the Kennedy Center Handel Festivals.
Betty Allen was an American operatic mezzo-soprano who had an active international singing career during the 1950s through the 1970s. In the latter part of her career her voice acquired a contralto-like darkening, which can be heard on her recording of Sergei Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky with conductor Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. She was known for her collaborations with American composers, such as Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Ned Rorem, and Virgil Thomson among others.
Tom Cipullo is an American composer. Known mostly for vocal music, he has also composed orchestral, chamber, and solo instrumental works. His opera, Glory Denied, has been performed to critical acclaim in New York, Washington, and Texas.
Pamela Dellal is an American mezzo-soprano in opera and concert, a musicologist and academic teacher. She has performed classical music from the medieval Hildegard von Bingen to contemporary. She is on the faculty of the Boston Conservatory, Brandeis University, and the Longy School of Music of Bard College. She has made English traslations of all german texts that Johann Sebastian Bach set to music.
Juliana Hall is an American composer of art songs, monodramas, and vocal chamber music. She has been described by the NATS Journal of Singing as "one of our country’s most able and prolific art song composers for almost three decades" and, in discussing her 1989 song cycle Syllables of Velvet, Sentences of Plush, the Journal went on to assert that "Even at this very early stage in her life and career, Hall knew something about crafting music whose beauty could enhance the text at hand without drawing attention away from that text. This is masterful writing in every respect."
Sydney Mancasola is an American operatic soprano singer.
Jocelyn Hagen is an American composer. She composes primarily for voice: solo, chamber and choral, but also has composed for chamber, wind, and orchestral ensembles. She has explored large-scale multimedia works, electro-acoustic music, dance, and opera.
Joyce Mathis was an American soprano who was a concert artist, recitalist, and opera singer from the 1960s into the early 1990s. She is considered a part of the first generation of black classical singers to achieve success in the United States; breaking down racial barriers within the field of classical music. She won several notable singing competitions, including the Marian Anderson Award in 1967 and the Young Concert Artists in 1968. In 1970 she recorded the role of the High Priestess in Verdi's Aida alongside Leontyne Price and Plácido Domingo. Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ned Rorem wrote his song cycle Women's Voices for her in 1975. In 1976 she created the role of Celestina in Roger Ames's opera Amistad at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. She appeared frequently in performances with Opera Ebony and the Boys Choir of Harlem in addition to touring widely as a recitalist and concert soprano.
Patsy Rogers is an American composer and teacher who has won several awards and commissions. She is active in the International Alliance for Women in Music (IAWM).