Wallis Giunta Profile: More Than A Queen Of The Night In Opera

Glamorama: Wallis Giunta captures a styling moment before a high-style photo shoot. (Photo: Facebook)

"This month, the mezzo sings Tiffany in Adams’s I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky for her Rome debut. Wallis Giunta’s mezzo boasts a silvery top and a hearty midrange, both deployed with crisp diction in an ever-growing repertoire of modern and classic roles. In November, she makes her German debut as Cherubino at Oper Leipzig, where her other assignments through June are Rossini’s Angelina, Siébel in Faust and even a Valkyrie. A July debut in Frankfurt, as Mercédès in Carmen, follows. An alum of the Met’s Lindemann Program, which she completed in 2013, the Canadian began her studies in Ottawa and Toronto, where her first undergrad assignments were quintessential soprano roles — Mozart’s Queen of the Night and Susanna. Now, she says, 'I have high notes, but I can’t live there. It’s not that I have a bad technique and I’m actually a soprano in hiding. The most colorful part of my voice is the middle. So if anyone ever says to me, ‘I think you’re a soprano,’ I say, ‘Well, yes, I am. A mezzo-soprano is just a different kind of soprano, and that’s the kind I am.'" [Source] Watch a video of Wallis Giunta singing "Parto, parto," from Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito, after the jump.

Wallis Giunta: A Canadian North Star Beginning To Shine Brightly

(Photo: Tobin Grimshaw)

The 25-year old mezzo-soprano Wallis Giunta could easily be confused for a Hollywood starlet like Isla Fisher, Amy Adams or even a young Julianne Moore with her glamorous looks and auburn hair. A native of Ottawa, she is currently a member of the Canadian Opera Company's Ensemble Studio, but her star is about to get a whole lot brighter. With a schedule that includes a recent stint at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the much-touted production of The Nightingale and Other Short Fables and this week she will partake in New York Festival of Song recitals at the Caramoor Festival in Katonah, N.Y., on March 13 and at New York’s Merkin Hall on March 15 and 17. After studying this coming summer in Italy with Kiri Te Kanawa and Germany with Edith Wiens, she will take

her spot in the Metropolitan Opera's Lindemann Young Artist Development Program for the 2011-12 season. The latter achievement came about when she was studying at the Steans Music Institute at Ravinia and met Brian Zeger, director of the LYADP and the vocal-arts department at the Juilliard School of Music, who arranged for her to audition for Maestro James Levine (for which she sang arias from Il Barbiere di Siviglia and La Clemenza di Tito). In November 2010, she saw her first opera at the MET. It was production of Così fan tutte with a cast that included LYADP alumni Nathan Gunn, Isabel Leonard and Danielle de Niese.