Meredith Arwady

In the 2008–2009 season, contralto Meredith Arwady debuts at the Metropolitan Opera as Pasqualita in John Adams’s Dr. Atomic, conducted by Alan Gilbert, and makes her European debut at the Oper Frankfurt as Ulrica in Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera. She also debuts with the Houston Grand Opera in the world premiere of André Previn’s opera A Brief Encounter. Future concert engagements include Do-It-Yourself Messiah with the Chicago International Music Foundation and Tippett’s A Child of our Time, as part of Carnegie Hall’s Honor! festival, curated by Jessye Norman.

Engagements for the 2007–2008 season included Beethoven Symphony No. 9 and Bach Cantata No. 7 with the Seattle Symphony, Mahler Symphony No. 2 with the Houston Symphony, Elgar’s Sea Pictures with the Kalamazoo Symphony, and as recitals in New York and Chicago sponsored by the Marilyn Horne Foundation. Ms. Arwady performed with the Lyric Opera of Chicago in the Peter Sellars production of John Adams’s Dr. Atomic, conducted by Robert Spano, and appeared as Mistress Quickly in Verdi’s Falstaff. Also that season at Lyric Opera, she appeared in a new production of Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, conducted by Sir Andrew Davis.

Ms. Arwady is a winner of the 2004 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. She is also the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the 2005 Kirsten Flagstad Award, presented by the George London Foundation, and a 2007 Richard Tucker Career Grant, and first prize in both the 2004 Licia Albanese / Puccini Competition and the inaugural Marian Anderson Prize for Emerging Classical Artists in 2002. As a member of the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Opera Center Ensemble, Ms. Arwady made her mainstage debut with the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2005, as Tisbe in La Cenerentola conducted by Bruno Campanella, Third Lady in Die Zauberflöte, and She-Ancient in Sir Michael Tippett’s A Midsummer Marriage, both conducted by Sir Andrew Davis.

Born in Michigan, Ms. Arwady received a master’s degree from The Curtis Institute of Music where she studied voice with Marlena Kleinman Malas.