BIOGRAPHY
Equally at home in opera and musical theater, soprano, Rachel Elezi has had the pleasure of engaging audiences across the United States and Europe. Recent engagements include her Off-Broadway debut in the Equity workshop of the new musical, The Little Match Girl, joining the Southern United States Tour of We’ll Meet Again: A New American Musical in the role of Hedwig Stern, and her debut as a concert soloist at the Anghiari Festival in Ischia, Italy.
In the fall of 2021, Ms. Elezi was announced as a semi-finalist in the Concorso Lirico Internazionale Santa Gianna Beretta Molla as a part of the Associazione Culturale Giuseppe Verdi, where she competed in Milan, Italy.
Slated to make her role debut in 2020 as Clorinda in Rossini's La Cenerentola with Geneva Light Opera, the production was cancelled due to Covid-19. Throughout the Covid lockdown, Rachel has sung in and curated several virtual concerts alongside mezzo-soprano, Phoebe Haines, partnering with and raising money for charities such as Ovarian Cancer Research Association and Great Ormond Street Hospital in London.
Highlights of the 2019-20 season included Ms. Elezi's return to Lincoln Center as a concert soloist honoring female composers. She also returned to Germany to sing in the Festpiele Mecklenberg-Vorpommern and the chamber music series, Musik und Miteinander.
The 2018-2019 season marked various exciting debuts for Ms. Elezi. She was delighted to have made her Lincoln Center debut at The Bruno Walter Auditorium, featured as part of the Leonard Bernstein Centennial Celebration, Lenny @ 100, in conjunction with an exhibition collection curated by the LA Grammy Museum. Ms. Elezi also made concert debuts across Europe where she was first heard as a soloist at the Sugrįžimai 2018 International Music Festival in Vilnius, Lithuania, followed by a series of concerts throughout some of the country's most well-known museums and castles. Ms. Elezi then made her German debut in the city of Hamburg where she was as a featured soloist at the Bergedorfer Sommerfestival/Musiktage, singing on their Mozart Gala.
In 2018, Ms. Elezi sang at the Boston Early Music Festival in Selva encantada de amor (Durón), a rarely performed Baroque Zarzuela. In the fall of 2016, she joined Center for Contemporary Opera (CCO), covering the role of Mrs. Fairfax in Louis Karchin’s premier of his opera, Jane Eyre. She can also be heard on the original cast recording on Naxos Records, which was released in 2019. In 2015 she made her Russian role debut singing Tamara in the Philadelphia premier of Anton Rubinstein’s The Demon. Other select opera roles include Barbarina (Le nozze di Figaro), Sandmann (Hänsel und Gretel), and Calisto (Daphnis et Chloé). A frequent performer of new music, she has performed with the Center for Contemporary Opera in their atelier of News from Poems (Susan Kander) and has covered lead roles in Four Sisters (Elena Langer) and Anon (Errollyn Wallen). Her professional debut was at the Cleveland Playhouse, singing and playing the violin in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.
Rachel has also had the privilege of premiering new chamber works by composers Denise Mei Yan Hofmann and Wendy Griffiths at the annual Music Under Construction concert in NYC In 2018, she debuted new excerpts from Wendy Griffinth's opera, The Crimson Sand, which she had previously originated roles for in 2016. Ms. Elezi also has a passion for Early Music, joining the New York Continuo Collective from 2015-17, singing on several of their concert series.
Ms. Elezi began her studies at Case Western Reserve University, receiving a BA in Music, as well as Classical Theatre. She holds a MM in Vocal Performance from the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. She is also a classically trained violinist.