BIOGRAPHY

Recipient of a 2007 Sullivan Foundation Encouragement Award, soprano Anne-Carolyn Bird is rapidly gaining attention by major companies in her young career. Of a performance in Venus & Adonis with the Seattle Early Music Guild, the Seattle Times says “ …no one shone brighter than Anne-Carolyn Bird … her stage presence [is] nothing short of magnetic.”

In 2007, Ms. Bird will make her Metropolitan Opera debut with two roles in a new production of Puccini’s Il trittico - the Young Lover in Il tabarro and Novice in SuorAngelica. Other responsibilities at the Metropolitan include covering Giannetta in the Annual Pension Fund Gala performance of L’elisir d’amore. She will spend the summer as a Filene Young Artist at the Wolf Trap Opera Company, where she will sing Celia in John Musto’s Volpone. Future performances include appearances with Arizona Opera (Yum-Yum in The Mikado), the Atlanta Symphony, Opera Grand Rapids (Susanna in Le Nozze di Figaro), and a return to the Metropolitan Opera as Barbarina in Le Nozze di Figaro.

In May 2007, she will make her New York recital debut as part of the VIM Tribeca recital series. In preparing for the recital, Ms. Bird founded The Bhakti Project, a fund-raising organization which has commissioned a work by Judd Greenstein. The work, Hillula, will have its premiere at the May recital with Jocelyn Dueck on piano.

The Bhakti Project is currently accepting donations for both the commission fee and a commercial recording of the Hillula, to be released on New Amsterdam Records in 2008.

Ms. Bird makes new music a regular part of her concert schedule, and she can be heard as the “Voice of the Fountain” on the Grammy Award-winning recording of Osvaldo Golijov’sAinadamar. She performed in the world premiere of Ainadamar as a student at the Tanglewood Music Center and later reprised her role in the revised version at the Santa Fe Opera in 2005 and at the Lincoln Center Golijov Festival in 2006. Also in 2006, she toured as the Soprano soloist in Golijov’s La Pasion segun San Marcos (“luminous” –The New York Times), with the Schola Cantorum de Caracas under the baton of Robert Spano. She has also performed the works of Bernard Rands, Augusta Read Thomas, and Lukas Foss.

In the standard repertoire, Ms. Bird is making a name for herself in the greatest roles of the lyric soprano repertoire: Nannetta (Falstaff), Zerlina (DonGiovanni), Gilda (Rigoletto), and the title roles of Lucia di Lammermoor, The Ballad of Baby Doe, and Romeo et Juliette. Recent performances have included Handel’s Messiahand Bach’s Magnificatwith Portland Baroque Orchestra, the stepdaughter Noémie in Laurent Pelly’s highly-acclaimed production of Cendrillonat Santa Fe Opera, and Bubikopf in Der Kaiser von Atlantiswith Seattle ’s Black Box Opera Theater.

Awards and honors for the young soprano include the Agnes M. Canning Memorial Award from the Santa Fe Opera, first prize in the Sun Valley Opera Competition, and third prize in the Eugene Opera Belle Voci Competition. A district winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and Finalist in the 2007 Oratorio Society of New York Competition, Ms. Bird has twice been a Young Artist with the Santa Fe Opera Apprentice Program for Singers and twice a Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center . She holds degrees from New England Conservatory and the University of Georgia.

Ms. Bird keeps a blog chronicling her life as a singer. It is read daily by music writers, administrators, opera fans, and singers worldwide at theconcert.blogspot.com.

updated May 14, 2007