Jessica Best, mezzo-soprano: "How to make it today's operatic world"

How to make it today's operatic world: Careers in Classical Music, Management, and Agency

Guest presenter: Jessica Best, mezzo-soprano

“Jessica Best gave a spine tingling rendition of Lloyd Webber’s Don’t Cry For Me Argentina that bewitched everyone in the audience.”
–South Magazine

“Ms. Best’s Infant Holy, Infant Lowly (in Polish) was very moving in its innocence.”
—New York Concert Review INC, Jeffrey Williams.

• Jessica is versatile artist, known for her dramatic interpretation and an easy, beautiful sound that crosses the operatic, musical theater, and concert stage. Ms. Best debuts Gordon Getty’s The Canterville Ghost and Usher House with LA OPERA in June 2018; performing the roles of Mrs. Otis and Madeline as Child. Best recently debuted the roles with The Center for Contemporary Opera in October 2018.
• Best has recorded the new opera, Jane Eyre, on the Naxos label by composer Louis Karchin, singing the roles of Bessie and Mary Rivers. Best performed these roles with The Center for Contemporary Opera in October 2017. Ms. Best performed the premiere of International Carol Suites by Mark Hayes, a DCINY production at Carnegie Hall in November of 2017. Best also premiered the role of Alice Ryley, by Michael Ching, with the Savannah Voice Festival in 2015.
• Ms. Best is beginning a spring tour with Velvet Caravan; an award-winning gypsy-jazz ensemble. She returns to The Savannah Music Festival with Velvet Caravan in concert this April and in a co-production with the Savannah Voice Festival; featuring songs of Classical Broadway.
• Best has been a featured artist with The Savannah Music Festival, The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, The Florida Orchestra, and The Rochester Oratorio Society. She has performed with The Santa Fe Opera, Opera Tampa, The Center for Contemporary Opera, Gotham Chamber Opera, Nickel City Opera, and Finger Lakes Opera.

“Best, in particular, brought Alice to life as we see her from her jail cell, optimistically dictating a letter to Gen. James Oglethorpe, making plans for a midwife to take her baby in case her pleas for mercy went unanswered and, ultimately, accepting her fate to be the first woman hanged for a crime in the state of Georgia. I know there were a few teary eyes in my row as Alice sang a beautiful Irish lullaby to the baby she would never know.”
—Heather Henley, Do Savannah

Listen now: Lullaby from Alice Ryley (2015)

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