Biography
Mezzo-soprano Laura Brooks Rice has won acclaim on the opera and concert stage for her rich, warm voice, musicality, charm and sensitive acting ability.
Since 1985, Miss Rice has been teaching at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey where she is Professor of Voice. In addition to teaching private voice, Miss Rice teaches courses in opera: The Singing Actor: Opera and Opera Auditions: Techniques and Preparation. Along with her teaching at Westminster, Miss Rice has a private studio of professional singers and has been a vocal consultant to the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Program and is currently the voice teacher for the Domingo-Cafritz Program with the Washington National Opera. She has been an adjunct voice faculty member at The Curtis Institute of Music. In the summers of 2012-2016 she was on the faculty of the distinguished program IVAI in Montreal and Virginia and New York. She has taught at Santa Fe Opera and at the Bel Canto Institute in San Miguel, Mexico.
Her private students are currently singing as regular principal artists at The Metropolitan Opera, Washington Opera, New York City Opera, Sarasota Opera, Opera Theater of St. Louis, Ft. Worth Opera, Dayton Opera, Minnesota Opera, Nashville Opera, Opera Company of Philadelphia, Mobile Opera, Maggio Musicale, Opera Omaha, Portland Opera, Knoxville Opera, San Diego Opera, Lake George Opera, Mozarteum in Salzburg, Opera North, Central City, Atlanta Opera and Aix en Provence.
Miss Rice has been on the steering committee for the Singer Training Council under the auspices of Opera America. She has been member of the board of advisors of Astral Artistic Services as well as the Princeton Festival. She has served as a judge on the panels of the National NATSAA Competition and Astral Artistic Services Annual Auditions.
She is the Co-Director of one of Westminster’s most innovative programs the CoOPERAtive Program, and three-week intensive opera training program. In August 2002 and 2005 she conducted master classes and taught private lessons for the Reykjavik Singing School in Reykjavik, Iceland.
In a diverse repertoire, including Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer, Elgar’s Sea Pictures, Brahm’s Alto Rhapsody and Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 Miss Rice has appeared from coast to coast in the United States in concerts and recitals. In recent seasons she has appeared with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra on several occasions in works including Handel’s Messiah, which she has also performed with numerous other orchestras nationwide. Miss Rice has performed with the New Jersey Symphony, Bethlehem Bach Festival and Boulder Bach Festival. She made her Mostly Mozart Festival debut singing the role of Apollo in Mozart’s Apollo and Hyacinth, has been heard in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with San Francisco, Atlanta, San Diego and New Jersey Symphonies with conductors, Kurt Masur, Kurt Sanderling, Robert Shaw and Hugh Wolf.
In the 1992-93 season Miss Rice made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera as Wowkle in La Fanciulla del West. Following her debut in 1981 with the San Francisco Opera as Grimgerde in Die Walküre she has appeared with that company in several productions, performing such roles as Dorabella in Cosi fan tutte, Marcellina in Le Nozze di Figaro, Varvara in Katya Kabanova and Suzuki in Madame Butterfly. She has also performed with the Spoleto Festival (Italy) in Honneger’s King David.
A participant in the San Francisco Opera’s Merola Program, she sang numerous performances ad an Adler Fellow with the San Francisco Opera Center.