2017 Adjudicators

Monica Whicher

Voice

Style and musical elegance combined with an intuitive theatrical sense are the hallmarks of soprano Monica Whicher’s performances on the concert and opera stage. She has performed with orchestras, opera companies and at chamber festivals across Canada and in the United States, Mexico, Europe and Asia with conductors including Helmuth Rilling, Peter Oundjian, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Franz Paul Decker, Steuart Bedford, Yannick Nezet-Seguin, Duane Wolff, Pinchas Zuckerman, Trevor Pinnick, Hervé Niquet, Andrew Parrott, Harry Bicket , Timothy Vernon and Alexander Weimann.

Along with all the major oratorio roles, operatic roles have included Thaïs (Massenet’s Thaïs), the Countess (Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro), Pamina and Erste Dame (Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte), Zerlina (Mozart’s Don Giovanni), Anna Maurant (Kurt Weill’s Street Scene), Dido (Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas), The Governess (Britten’s Turn of the Screw) and Female Chorus (Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia), with companies such as The Canadian Opera Company, Opera Atelier, Pacific Opera Victoria, Vancouver Opera, The Cleveland Opera, Opera in Concert and the Nürnberg International Chamber Music Festival.

Ms. Whicher was nominated for a Juno Award for “Singing Somers Theatre” (Centrediscs) as well as two Dora Mavor Moore Awards, and praised for her Naxos recording of Castor et Pollux. Her critically acclaimed portrayal of Mérope in Lully’s PERSEE can be seen on the EuroArts/Naxos DVD and she is featured on the Juno-Award winning CDs Mozart’s Magic Fantasy, Beethoven Lives Upstairs and Daydreams and Lullabies. Recent recordings include Lullabies and Carols for Christmas, with harpist Judy Loman for Naxos, and The Art Songs of Mykola Lysenko, The Art Songs of Yakov Stepovyi, and The Galicians, all for the Ukrainian Art Song Project. She has been heard on CBC, NPR and the Bayerischer Rundfunk.

A former member of the Canadian Opera Company Ensemble Studio, Ms. Whicher studied at the Banff School of Fine Arts, the Britten-Pears School of Music (Aldeburgh, England), the Steans Institute (Ravinia Festival, USA), and was a recipient of the George London Award, Sullivan Foundation Grants, and a Canada Council Career Development Grant. She is a graduate of the University of Toronto, where she was a student of the renowned Canadian soprano, Lois Marshall. Monica Whicher is on the Voice Faculty of the University of Toronto and the Glenn Gould School of the Royal Conservatory of Music.