During the years of the Belle Époque in Paris, artmaking wasn’t happening in any royal court – it was happening in people’s living rooms. Paris’s patrons of the arts and artists alike, such as the heiress and royal-by-marriage Winnaretta Singer, the symbolist poet Stephane Mallarmé, and the soprano Emma Bardac…

The second foreign language I studied as a child, after Modern Greek, was French. As a result, when I began studying voice in earnest, the first non-English songs my teacher assigned me were songs in French by Reynaldo Hahn and Gabriel Fauré. It was through these songs that I discovered my love of singing classical music…

In the summer of 2003, I had the honor of representing the United States of America at the BBC Singer of the World competition in Cardiff, Wales. The competition is a sort of operatic Olympics, with singers coming from 20-25 nations to compete in the final rounds for a handful of prizes…