ANNE.HARLEY
soprano

Soprano Anne Harley BA (Yale College); MMus (Boston University); Opera Certificate (Boston University Opera Institute); DMA (Boston University) is a prize-winning performer-scholar and educator based in Claremont, California.

The Boston Globe acclaimed Anne Harley’s performance in Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s American premiere of Peter Eötvös’s Angels in America as “vocally and dramatically outstanding.” The Village Voice described her solo in the Boston Camerata’s American Shaker program for the Tero Saarinen Dance Company at Brooklyn Academy of Music as transmitting a “heart-wrenching purity.” She débuted in Europe at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw as the lead in Handel’s Acis and Galatea and created the roles of Imagination and Zélide in the modern-day premiere of Royer’s Le pouvoir de l’amour in conjunction with the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles and Oberlin College.

She has premiered, performed and recorded works by contemporary composers Evan Ziporyn, John Adams, Lee Hoiby, Louis Andriessen, Peter Eötvös and John Harbison, Jodi Goble, Christine Southworth, Moshe Shulman, Yii Kah Hoe and Chaipruck Mekara, among others. She performs in North America, Europe and Asia and has appeared as soloist with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (Angels in America), Opera Boston (Nixon in China), American Repertory Theatre (Oedipus), Handel & Haydn Society, Boston Camerata, and at the Banff Centre for the Arts and at the Tanglewood Festival. She founded the new music project Voices Of The Pearl, which commissions song cycles to texts by and about female esoteric practitioners from all world traditions. In June 2014, in China and Malaysia, she premiered Yii Kah Hoe’s new Chinese song cycle “The Secret Book of Sun Bu’er,” which sets Daoist instructional poems by the twelfth-century female immortal Sun Bu’er. She leads the groundbreaking early Russian music ensemble TALISMAN with Dr. Oleg Timofeyev. Their first recording project of modern-day premieres of music by women composers from the court of Catherine the Great won the Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society and garnered praise from Gramophone.

She is extremely committed to interdisciplinary and intercultural projects that incorporate new media and movement in the service of music and drama.She premiered the role of Margaret Mead in the dance-opera A House in Bali by Evan Ziporyn, with libretto by Paul Schick, in the Water Palace Theater in Ubud, Bali and later at CalPerformances in Berkeley, California, the Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival and in Boston, performing with gamelan, Bang-On-A-Can Ensemble and Balinese traditional singers and dancers. As a stage director she led full productions of several standard operas with orchestra (Harvard’s Lowell House Opera; University of North Carolina, Charlotte) with undergraduates and pre-professionals.

She is committed to scholarship in issues relating to interdisciplinary and intercultural comparative vocal pedagogy, and was invited in 2013 to hold a visiting professorship at the Hannover Hochschule, Germany, supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). She is a regularly invited teacher of voice at several universities in the People’s Republic of China, and both speaks and performs in Mandarin.

Born in Toronto, Canada, Anne Harley moved to the US to study comparative literature at Yale University and then to Boston, where she trained in voice and opera performance at Boston University. Since 2009, she teaches voice, music history and interdisciplinary humanities at Scripps College, and specializes in performing music from challenging and ground-breaking contemporary composers as well as music from early oral and written traditions in Europe, America and Russia.

Her solo performances are available on Hänssler Profil, Naxos, Sony Classics, Canteloupe, Musica Omnia, einKlang and BMOP/sound, among others.

Anne Harley’s official website

Return to main Musicians Page