Janet Williams
Encyclopedia
Janet Williams is an American soprano
who has won international critical acclaim for performances at the Metropolitan Opera
, Berlin Staatsoper, Paris Opera
, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées
, Opera de Lyon, Nice Opera, Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, Opera Geneva
, Frankfurt Opera, Cologne Opera
, Leipzig Opera, San Francisco Opera
, Washington Opera, Dallas Opera
, and Michigan Opera Theatre
as well as in concerts throughout Europe, North America, Canada, Israel and Japan with conductors including Vladimir Ashkenazy
, Daniel Barenboim
, Myung-whun Chung
, Philippe Herreweghe
, René Jacobs, Marek Janowski
, Neemi Jarvi, Raymond Leppard
, Fabio Luisi
, Sir Neville Marriner
, Nicholas McGegan
, Zubin Mehta
, Kent Nagano
, John Nelson
, Donald Runnicles
, Gerard Schwarz
and Michael Tilson Thomas
.
, the Chicago Symphony, the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York and Tokyo, the New World Symphony, the Detroit Symphony, the New York, Los Angeles and Santa Fe Chamber Orchestras, as well as with orchestras throughout Europe in repertoire ranging from Bach and Mozart to contemporary works of living composers. Her interpretations as a recitalist have been critically acclaimed in New York, San Francisco, Washington D.C. and Detroit as well as Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, and in Iceland.
Williams' professional career began with the San Francisco Opera Center as a member of the Merola Program. She was awarded an Adler Fellowship and subsequently appeared with the company as a guest artist singing leading roles in the operas of Mozart, Puccini, Handel and Rossini. She was a member of the Berlin Staatsoper ensemble, making a critically acclaimed debut as Cleopatra in Carl Heinrich Graun's Cleopatra e Cesare. Other roles in her repertoire include Pamina in Die Zauberflöte
, Konstanze and Blondchen in Die Entführung aus dem Serail
, Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro
, Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier
, Adina in L'elisir d'amore
, Ännchen in Der Freischütz
, Adele in Die Fledermaus
, Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia, Musetta in La bohème
, Gilda in Rigoletto
, Oscar in Un ballo in maschera
, and Nannetta in Falstaff
, as well as the Jungfrau in Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron
and Manon in Henze's Boulevard Solitude
. She is especially acclaimed for leading roles in the baroque operas of Handel, Telemann, Gassmann and Stradella at the Handel Festival in Halle
, the Festwochen der Alten Musik
in Innsbruck, Austria; the Spoleto Festival
Italy, the Schwetzingen Festival
, the Wexford Festival
in Ireland and the Styriarte Festival in Graz.
Williams recently made her theatrical debut in Dante’s La Vita Nova in a co-production of the Berlin Renaissance Theater and the Bayer-Leverkusen Kulturhaus. She has appeared in nationally and internationally televised specials, including the Kennedy Center Honors Concert in a tribute to honoree Marilyn Horne, the PBS broadcast of the San Francisco Opera Gala co-hosted by Joan Sutherland and the ARTE film documentary L'Opera Seria. She was featured in an Oscar-winning documentary of the San Francisco Opera Chorus as Musetta in Francesca Zambello's production of La bohème. Her recordings include Brahms' Ein deutsches Requiem with the Chicago Symphony under Daniel Barenboim, Handel's Messiah with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra under Nicholas McGegan, Graun's Cleopatra e Cesare with the Concerto Köln Orchestra under René Jacobs and Cimarosa's Il matrimonio segreto under Gabriele Bellini.
in Helen Donath, Kammersängerin Reri Grist and noted international vocal pedagogue David Jones.
Janet Williams was recently named Guest Professor of the Hochschule für Musik Hans Eisler in Berlin and is currently on the voice faculties of the Hochschule für Musik and Theater
in Rostock and the Lotte Lehmann Summer Academy in Perleberg, Germany. She has presented master classes, seminars and workshops across the United States, as well as in London, Paris, Reykjavik and Berlin. Her book, Nail Your Next Audition, The Ultimate 30-Day Guide for Singers, has attracted a global following of young singers and voice professionals.
Soprano
A soprano is a voice type with a vocal range from approximately middle C to "high A" in choral music, or to "soprano C" or higher in operatic music. In four-part chorale style harmony, the soprano takes the highest part, which usually encompasses the melody...
who has won international critical acclaim for performances at the Metropolitan Opera
Metropolitan Opera
The Metropolitan Opera is an opera company, located in New York City. Originally founded in 1880, the company gave its first performance on October 22, 1883. The company is operated by the non-profit Metropolitan Opera Association, with Peter Gelb as general manager...
, Berlin Staatsoper, Paris Opera
Paris Opera
The Paris Opera is the primary opera company of Paris, France. It was founded in 1669 by Louis XIV as the Académie d'Opéra and shortly thereafter was placed under the leadership of Jean-Baptiste Lully and renamed the Académie Royale de Musique...
, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées
Théâtre des Champs-Élysées
The Théâtre des Champs-Élysées is a theatre at 15 avenue Montaigne. Despite its name, the theatre is not on the Champs-Élysées but nearby in another part of the 8th arrondissement of Paris....
, Opera de Lyon, Nice Opera, Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, Opera Geneva
Grand Théâtre de Genève
Grand Théâtre de Genève is an opera house in Geneva, Switzerland.As with many other opera houses, the Grand Théâtre de Genève is both a venue and an institution. The venue is a majestic building, towering over Place Neuve, officially opened in 1876, partly destroyed by fire in 1951 and reopened in...
, Frankfurt Opera, Cologne Opera
Cologne Opera
The Cologne Opera refers both to the main opera house in Cologne, Germany and to its resident opera company.-History of the company:...
, Leipzig Opera, San Francisco Opera
San Francisco Opera
San Francisco Opera is an American opera company, based in San Francisco, California.It was founded in 1923 by Gaetano Merola and is the second largest opera company in North America...
, Washington Opera, Dallas Opera
Dallas Opera
The Dallas Opera is an opera company located in Dallas, Texas . The company was founded in 1957 as the Dallas Civic Opera by Laurence Kelly and Nicolà Rescigno, both of whom had been active with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the first as administrator, the second as artistic director.-The company's...
, and Michigan Opera Theatre
Michigan Opera Theatre
Michigan Opera Theatre is Michigan's principal opera company. The company is based in Detroit, where it performs in the Detroit Opera House. Each year it presents an opera and dance season. The company usually presents five operas in their original language with English supertitles and hosts five...
as well as in concerts throughout Europe, North America, Canada, Israel and Japan with conductors including Vladimir Ashkenazy
Vladimir Ashkenazy
Vladimir Davidovich Ashkenazy is a Russian-Icelandic conductor and pianist. Since 1972 he has been a citizen of Iceland, his wife Þórunn's country of birth. Since 1978, because of his many obligations in Europe, he and his family have resided in Meggen, near Lucerne in Switzerland...
, Daniel Barenboim
Daniel Barenboim
Daniel Barenboim, KBE is an Argentinian-Israeli pianist and conductor. He has served as music director of several major symphonic and operatic orchestras and made numerous recordings....
, Myung-whun Chung
Myung-Whun Chung
Myung-whun Chung is a South Korean pianist and conductor.His sisters, violinist Kyung-wha Chung, and cellist Myung-wha Chung, and he at one time performed together as the Chung Trio. He was a joined second-prize winner in the 1974 International Tchaikovsky Competition. Chung studied conducting at...
, Philippe Herreweghe
Philippe Herreweghe
Philippe Herreweghe is a Flemish conductor.In his school years at the University of Ghent, Herreweghe combined studies in medical science and psychiatry with a musical education at the Ghent Conservatory, where Marcel Gazelle, Yehudi Menuhin's accompanist, was his piano teacher...
, René Jacobs, Marek Janowski
Marek Janowski
Marek Janowski is a Polish-born conductor.Janowski grew up in Wuppertal, Germany, near Cologne, after his mother traveled there at the start of World War II to be with her parents...
, Neemi Jarvi, Raymond Leppard
Raymond Leppard
Raymond "Def" Leppard, CBE is a British conductor and harpsichordist.He was born in London and grew up in Bath, where he was educated at the City of Bath Boys' School, now known as the Beechen Cliff School...
, Fabio Luisi
Fabio Luisi
Fabio Luisi is an Italian conductor. On September 6, 2011, he was named Principal Conductor of the Metropolitan Opera....
, Sir Neville Marriner
Neville Marriner
Sir Neville Marriner is an English conductor and violinist.-Biography:Marriner was born in Lincoln and studied at the Royal College of Music and the Paris Conservatoire. He played the violin in the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Martin String Quartet and London Symphony Orchestra, playing with the...
, Nicholas McGegan
Nicholas McGegan
Nicholas McGegan OBE is a British harpsichordist, flautist, conductor and early music expert....
, Zubin Mehta
Zubin Mehta
Zubin Mehta is an Indian conductor of western classical music. He is the Music Director for Life of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.-Biography:...
, Kent Nagano
Kent Nagano
__FORCETOC__Kent George Nagano is an American conductor and opera administrator. He is currently the music director of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal and the Bavarian State Opera.-Biography:...
, John Nelson
John Nelson
John Nelson may refer to:*John Nelson , Australian political figure*John Nelson , US baseball player...
, Donald Runnicles
Donald Runnicles
Donald Runnicles is a Scottish conductor who has worked extensively in other countries, particularly Germany and the USA....
, Gerard Schwarz
Gerard Schwarz
Gerard Schwarz is an American conductor. He was music director of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra from 1985 to 2011.In 2007 Schwarz was named music director of the Eastern Music Festival in North Carolina, having served as principal conductor since 2005...
and Michael Tilson Thomas
Michael Tilson Thomas
Michael Tilson Thomas is an American conductor, pianist and composer. He is currently music director of the San Francisco Symphony, and artistic director of the New World Symphony Orchestra.-Early years:...
.
Career
Williams has appeared with the Israel Philharmonic at Carnegie HallCarnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....
, the Chicago Symphony, the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York and Tokyo, the New World Symphony, the Detroit Symphony, the New York, Los Angeles and Santa Fe Chamber Orchestras, as well as with orchestras throughout Europe in repertoire ranging from Bach and Mozart to contemporary works of living composers. Her interpretations as a recitalist have been critically acclaimed in New York, San Francisco, Washington D.C. and Detroit as well as Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, and in Iceland.
Williams' professional career began with the San Francisco Opera Center as a member of the Merola Program. She was awarded an Adler Fellowship and subsequently appeared with the company as a guest artist singing leading roles in the operas of Mozart, Puccini, Handel and Rossini. She was a member of the Berlin Staatsoper ensemble, making a critically acclaimed debut as Cleopatra in Carl Heinrich Graun's Cleopatra e Cesare. Other roles in her repertoire include Pamina in Die Zauberflöte
The Magic Flute
The Magic Flute is an opera in two acts composed in 1791 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to a German libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. The work is in the form of a Singspiel, a popular form that included both singing and spoken dialogue....
, Konstanze and Blondchen in Die Entführung aus dem Serail
Die Entführung aus dem Serail
Die Entführung aus dem Serail is an opera Singspiel in three acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The German libretto is by Christoph Friedrich Bretzner with adaptations by Gottlieb Stephanie...
, Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro
The Marriage of Figaro
Le nozze di Figaro, ossia la folle giornata , K. 492, is an opera buffa composed in 1786 in four acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, based on a stage comedy by Pierre Beaumarchais, La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro .Although the play by...
, Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier
Der Rosenkavalier
Der Rosenkavalier is a comic opera in three acts by Richard Strauss to an original German libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. It is loosely adapted from the novel Les amours du chevalier de Faublas by Louvet de Couvrai and Molière’s comedy Monsieur de Pourceaugnac...
, Adina in L'elisir d'amore
L'elisir d'amore
L'elisir d'amore is an opera by the Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti. It is a melodramma giocoso in two acts...
, Ännchen in Der Freischütz
Der Freischütz
Der Freischütz is an opera in three acts by Carl Maria von Weber with a libretto by Friedrich Kind. It premiered on 18 June 1821 at the Schauspielhaus Berlin...
, Adele in Die Fledermaus
Die Fledermaus
Die Fledermaus is an operetta composed by Johann Strauss II to a German libretto by Karl Haffner and Richard Genée.- Literary sources :...
, Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia, Musetta in La bohème
La bohème
La bohème is an opera in four acts,Puccini called the divisions quadro, a tableau or "image", rather than atto . by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, based on Scènes de la vie de bohème by Henri Murger...
, Gilda in Rigoletto
Rigoletto
Rigoletto is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi. The Italian libretto was written by Francesco Maria Piave based on the play Le roi s'amuse by Victor Hugo. It was first performed at La Fenice in Venice on March 11, 1851...
, Oscar in Un ballo in maschera
Un ballo in maschera
Un ballo in maschera , is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi with text by Antonio Somma. The libretto is loosely based on an 1833 play, Gustave III, by French playwright Eugène Scribe who wrote about the historical assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden...
, and Nannetta in Falstaff
Falstaff (opera)
Falstaff is an operatic commedia lirica in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi, adapted by Arrigo Boito from Shakespeare's plays The Merry Wives of Windsor and scenes from Henry IV. It was Verdi's last opera, written in the composer's ninth decade, and only the second of his 26 operas to be a comedy...
, as well as the Jungfrau in Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron
Moses und Aron
Moses und Aron is a three-act opera by Arnold Schoenberg with the third act unfinished. The German libretto was by the composer after the Book of Exodus.-Compositional history:...
and Manon in Henze's Boulevard Solitude
Boulevard Solitude
Boulevard Solitutde is a Lyrisches Drama or opera in one act by Hans Werner Henze to a German libretto by Grete Weil after the play by Walter Jockisch, in its turn a modern telling of François Prévost's Manon Lescaut. The premiere was on February 17, 1952 at the Landestheater, Hanover...
. She is especially acclaimed for leading roles in the baroque operas of Handel, Telemann, Gassmann and Stradella at the Handel Festival in Halle
Handel Festival, Halle
The Handel Festival in Halle is an international music festival, concentrating on the music of George Frideric Handel, in the composer's birthplace in Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany. The festival was founded in 1922 and grew into a center of Handel studies and performance in Europe...
, the Festwochen der Alten Musik
Festwochen der Alten Musik
The Innsbrucker Festwochen der Alten Musik is an early music festival founded in 1976.In the year 1963, to celebrate the 600th anniversary of Tyrolean apartenage to Austria, the Innsbruck musician Prof...
in Innsbruck, Austria; the Spoleto Festival
Festival dei Due Mondi
The Festival dei Due Mondi ' is an annual summer music and opera festival held each June to early July in Spoleto, Italy, since its founding by composer Gian Carlo Menotti in 1958...
Italy, the Schwetzingen Festival
Schwetzingen Festival
The Schwetzingen Festival is an early summer festival of opera and other classical music presented each year from May to early June in Schwetzingen, Germany....
, the Wexford Festival
Wexford Festival Opera
The Wexford Festival Opera is an opera festival that takes place in the town of Wexford in South-Eastern Ireland during the months of October and November.-Festival origins under Tom Walsh, 1951 to 1966:...
in Ireland and the Styriarte Festival in Graz.
Williams recently made her theatrical debut in Dante’s La Vita Nova in a co-production of the Berlin Renaissance Theater and the Bayer-Leverkusen Kulturhaus. She has appeared in nationally and internationally televised specials, including the Kennedy Center Honors Concert in a tribute to honoree Marilyn Horne, the PBS broadcast of the San Francisco Opera Gala co-hosted by Joan Sutherland and the ARTE film documentary L'Opera Seria. She was featured in an Oscar-winning documentary of the San Francisco Opera Chorus as Musetta in Francesca Zambello's production of La bohème. Her recordings include Brahms' Ein deutsches Requiem with the Chicago Symphony under Daniel Barenboim, Handel's Messiah with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra under Nicholas McGegan, Graun's Cleopatra e Cesare with the Concerto Köln Orchestra under René Jacobs and Cimarosa's Il matrimonio segreto under Gabriele Bellini.
Academic career
Williams holds Bachelor degrees in both Music Education and Vocal Performance from Michigan State University and a Masters in Vocal Performance from Indiana University, where she was a student and Assistant Instructor under Professor Camilla Williams. Other instructors and mentors have included world-renowned singers Regine Crespin, KammersängerKammersänger
Kammersänger , abbreviation: "Ks.", literally means "Chamber singer." It is a German honorific title for distinguished singers...
in Helen Donath, Kammersängerin Reri Grist and noted international vocal pedagogue David Jones.
Janet Williams was recently named Guest Professor of the Hochschule für Musik Hans Eisler in Berlin and is currently on the voice faculties of the Hochschule für Musik and Theater
Rostock University of Music and Theatre
The Rostock University of Music and Theatre is a college of music in Rostock, Germany. The Hochschule opened in 1994 and is situated in a former cloister named Katharinenkloster in the hanseatic city of Rostock...
in Rostock and the Lotte Lehmann Summer Academy in Perleberg, Germany. She has presented master classes, seminars and workshops across the United States, as well as in London, Paris, Reykjavik and Berlin. Her book, Nail Your Next Audition, The Ultimate 30-Day Guide for Singers, has attracted a global following of young singers and voice professionals.
Publications
- Nail Your Next Audition, The Ultimate 30-Day Guide for Singers, 2006. ISBN 978-0978752101