Elizabeth Keusch, soprano

Young American soprano Elizabeth Keusch is rapidly emerging as an artist to watch and has already been heard in major venues worldwide. She has performed recently in Disney Hall with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and composer/conductor Thomas Ades in works by Castiglioni and Kurtag and in the Seattle Chamber Players’ Icebreaker III Festival. Ms. Keusch made her Arizona Opera debut in the past season as Polly Peachum in Bernard Uzan’s production of Kurt Weill’s Three Penny Opera conducted by George Hanson. The 2005-06 season also saw her debut with Washington DC Choral Arts Society in Mozart’s Requiem conducted by Norman Scribner, and with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in Elliott Carter’s Tempo e tempi, conducted by Scott Yoo. Successive engagements since 2003 with Maestro Helmut Rilling of the Oregon Bach Festival and Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart include Handel’s Belshazzar (role of Nitocres), Jeptha (role of Iphis), the Bach Magnificat, Bach Cantatas 14, 36, 112, 140, 147, Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem, Mozart’s Requiem and C Minor Mass and Mendelssohn’s Elijah. In Spring 2005 she performed Elijah with Maestro Rilling in her Seattle Symphony debut.

Season 2007-08 continues the successful collaboration with Helmut Rilling, this time in Britten’s War Requiem with the Bachakademie Stuttgart. Other notable engagements include a recital at the Jasper Arts Center and performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Handel’s Messiah with the National Chorale under Martin Josman. During 2006-07 Ms. Keusch made her debut with the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Oliver Knussen’s Songs for Sue under the composer’s direction, appeared with Helmuth Rilling and the International Bachakademie Stuttgart as Merab in Handel’s Saul and sang under Norman Scribner and the DC Choral Arts Society in Poulenc’s Stabat Mater and Amy Beach’s Canticle to the Sun. Appearances with the Florida Orchestra in Schubert’s Mass No. 6 under Stephan Sanderling and the Xalapa Symphony with Haydn’s Jahreszeiten under Carlos Miguel Prieto rounded out the season.

Performances of Academy-Award winning composer Tan Dun’s Water Passion for St. Matthew have taken her to the Europaische Musikfest 2000 in Stuttgart, Germany for the world premiere and to both Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2002 Next Wave and 2005 South Street Seaport Festivals in New York City, the 2002 Oregon Bach Festival, the 2003 Macau International Festival and the 2005 Perth International Arts Festival. The soprano has performed additional works of Tan Dun with the Taipei Symphony, Singapore Symphony and Shanghai Broadcasting Orchestras. Ms. Keusch’s Boston Symphony Orchestra debut with conductor Robert Spano occurred with the 2000 American premiere of Osvaldo Golijov’s La Pasión Según San Marcos.

Other orchestral performances include Beethoven’s 9th Symphony with Dallas Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, George Benjamin’s Mind of Winter and Oliver Knussen’s Whitman Settings with Berlin Philharmonic and New World Symphonies, Liszt’s Missa Solemnis with American Symphony Orchestra, Handel’s Messiah with Minnesota Symphony, and the Mater Gloriosa in Mahler’s 2nd Symphony with Boston Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. Widely recognized for her remarkable musicianship, Ms. Keusch is an avid champion of chamber music and new music. In 06 the soprano toured Portugal with Ensemble Contrapunctus performing Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Shostokovich’s Seven Block Songs. The soprano has had successive collaborations on Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella Series and with Boston Musica Viva, Collage New Music (Boston), the Seattle Chamber Players and Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin. In 2005 Ms. Keusch has toured the northeast with both the Borromeo and Brentano String Quartets performing Schoenberg’s 2nd String Quartet, and she debuted at the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society in Alice Tully Hall with the Pacifica Quartet in Osvaldo Golijov’s Tenebre and How Slow the Wind.

Also in demand for opera productions worldwide, the soprano gave the 2005 world premiere of Matthias Pintscher’s L’espace dernier conducted by Kwame Ryan in her debut with Opéra National de Paris and she also premiered Paul-Heinz Dittrich’s opera Zerbrochene Bilder (role of Medea) with the Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin and Musikakademie Rheinsberg. She also performed the leading role of First Soprano in Helmut Lachenmann’s Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern with the Stuttgart Staatsoper in Stuttgart and Paris with director Peter Mussbach and conductor Lothar Zagrosek. She repeated the work in a production directed by Alfred Kirchner with Neue Oper Wien in the 2003 Wiener Festwochen. With Encompass New Opera Theatre (NYC) the soprano was seen as Yvonne in Antheil’s Venus in Africa, Phaedra in Britten’s dramatic oratorio of the same name and the title role in Argento’s Miss Havisham’s Wedding Night. Ms. Keusch holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of North Texas, a Master’s of Music Degree and an Artist Diploma from New England Conservatory. While at New England Conservatory she was named the 2001 Presidential Scholar for the Conservatory. The soprano was a Tanglewood Fellow in summers 1997 and 1999. Elizabeth Keusch resides in Worcester, Massachusetts.

New York Times
August 1, 2007
MUSIC REVIEW | RIVER TO RIVER FESTIVAL
Nine Roles, One Able Soprano and Abundant Conniving
By STEVE SMITH
Of the myriad challenges a soprano can set before herself in a recital, none offer precisely the same sort of
demands as Judith Weir’s “King Harald’s Saga,” from 1979. The work’s wide vocal range and elaborately curling
melodies require a singer with exceptional flexibility and flawless intonation. Then there are the dramaturgical
concerns: Ms. Weir’s quirky piece is a three-act opera that includes nine roles, all sung by unaccompanied
soprano in the space of 12 minutes.

“King Harald’s Saga” turns up now and then as an entertaining diversion on a new-music program, a star turn for
a featured singer. But Elizabeth Keusch, a young soprano based in Worcester, Mass., used it as the foundation for
a provocative recital on Monday at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University. The hourlong
concert was part of “Summer Stars,” the classical-music series of the sprawling River to River Festival.

Ms. Weir’s work sketches the historical tale of a bellicose Norwegian king counseled by a conniving English earl to
embark on an invasion of England in 1066 that ultimately fails. What united the opera with the two pieces that
preceded it on her program, Ms. Keusch explained during a break midway through the concert, was that they all
feature “characters coming to their own demise in pursuit of an illusion.”

Ms. Keusch opened with Haydn’s “Arianna a Naxos,” a striking cantata in which the Cretan princess Ariadne,
abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos, first rages against her betrayer, then resigns herself to a watery
grave. Ms. Keusch sang clearly and with attractive tone, but seemed reserved in the opening recitative. Her
performance flared to life when the spurned Ariadne discovers her abandonment. Eric Culver, Ms. Keusch’s
accompanist, seemed unsympathetic to the work’s flamboyant mood swings.

In Britten’s gripping “Phaedra,” a late masterpiece modeled after Handel’s dramatic cantatas, Theseus is the
wronged party: his wife, Phaedra, believing him dead, attempts to seduce her stepson, Hippolytus, then commits
suicide when she is rejected. Ms. Keusch was powerful and poignant, her diction superbly projected. Mr. Culver
was more effective in Britten’s resourceful, darkly erotic music.

Abandoning the gowns she had previously worn for loose-fitting pajamas, Ms. Keusch threw herself physically
into “King Harald’s Saga,” carefully differentiating each tiny role through tone, manner and gesture in a brave,
assured performance. The evening’s obsessive quality extended to her encore: a fiery-eyed rendition of Kurt
Weill’s “Wie Lange Noch.”