Michaela Larsen

Current Position

Experience

Opera Kansas

2025 - 2025

Principal Artist

2025 - 2025
Louise Thaden in Lisa DeSpain & Rachel Peters's Staggerwing
Chautauqua, NY

Young Artist

2025 - 2025
Cherubino, Le nozze di Figaro (Mozart) Carmela, La Vida breve (de Falla) Angel/Ensemble, Lincoln in the Bardo (Mazzoli/Vavrek) *Orchestral Workshop with Chautauqua Symphony & Chautauqua Opera Company*
Wichita, Kansas

Principal Artist

2024 - 2024
Pauline Viardot, Michael Ching's Notes on Viardot

Schedule

Upcoming Engagements

Biography

Michaela Larsen

Heralded by the Brooklyn Discovery as “visually and vocally another bright ray,” Michaela Larsen has a voice that is “plangent [and] coupled with excellent stagecraft.”

Recent credits include: Cherubino (Le Nozze di Figaro) with Chautauqua Opera Conservatory, Sunnyside Opera, Stony Brook Opera, and Vienna Summer Music Festival; Hermia (Brittan’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) with Chicago Summer Opera; the title role in Gustav Holst’s Sāvitri; Venus in John Blow’s Venus and Adonis; and Nancy in Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring with Stony Brook Opera.

Ms. Larsen shines brightly in new opera, appearing in Michael Ching’s Notes on Viardot, a whimsical historical account of the illustrious singer/composer Pauline Viardot. Ms. Larsen portrayed the diva with Music OnSite in Wichita, Kansas in December 2024, receiving high praise from the composer himself for her interpretation of the role. Another warmly received return to Wichita saw her portrayal of pioneering woman pilot, Louise Thaden, in Lisa DeSpain and Rachel Peters’s Staggerwing, with Opera Kansas.

She was a Young Artist at the Chautauqua Institution’s Opera Conservatory in the Summer of 2025, where she sang in the orchestral workshop of Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s Lincoln in the Bardo, as well as Manuel de Falla’s La Vida Breve, appearing as Carmela.

Ms. Larsen appears frequently with the New York Philharmonic Chorus and made her Metropolitan Opera debut in the company’s acclaimed Verdi Requiem in September 2023, returning in the 2024-25 season in Beethoven’s Fidelio. She has performed with the all-professional octet at the Church of Corpus Christi, under the direction of Louise Basbas, succeeded by Kalle Toivio, and is now a resident artist with the Schola Cantorum of the Church of Saint Agnes, under the leadership of Eva Sze.

Concert engagements include Copland’s Old American Songs with the Long Island Concert Orchestra (Rites of Spring Festival at The Suffolk Theatre), and recurring appearances with the Opera Night Long Island concert series (Northport, NY).

Outside of her work as a performer, Ms. Larsen is an avid scholar, currently completing her doctoral studies at Stony Brook University, where she has presented her research on the life and work of Pauline Viardot, her arrangements of Chopin’s Mazurkas, served as the coordinator for Undergraduate Voice Activities, and taught voice at the collegiate level for voice majors, as well as students from various disciplines in search of building their voice and creative presence.

She has been engaged as a research partner with a team from the Stony Brook University Hospital and Renaissance School of Medicine to contribute to the knowledge of singing’s impact on patients with Long Covid, their sustained diaphragmatic function, and overall quality of life. She is also a guest clinician with Shakespeare for Parkinson’s.

At the heart of her artistic endeavors, regardless of their shapes or forms, Michaela lives and breathes that singing is for everyone, and the power of the human voice is unshakable and to be celebrated as long as she has breath in her lungs.

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