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Wanda Brister

Email Address wbrister@fsu.edu

Phone 850-644-5073

Office KMU 325A

Professor Wanda Brister has sung performances in opera, oratorio, and recital from Vancouver to Moscow to Rio. She holds three degrees in vocal performance and attended the Academy of Vocal Arts. As a student, she worked as a studio accompanist and discovered her love vocal literature. Her doctoral work was with Carol Kimball at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, a degree she pursued after her singing career.

She has recorded four discs of songs of Madeleine Dring and a French CD for Cambria Music, vocal works of Laitman, McLarry, Chabrier, Baldwin, and Wanamaker on three recently released CDs for Mark Records, and Johann Strauss II with New York Vocal Arts Ensemble on Arabesque. All these recordings can be found on Spotify and Naxos Music Library as well as being available commercially. Her CDs have been reviewed in the Journal of Singing receiving glowing commentary. Her CD of Dring Cabaret Songs won “Album of the Year” in its category from the British Light Music Society in 2019.

She has become a respected specialist on composer Madeleine Dring, having recorded her songs, published her only opera, Cupboard Love (2017), nine volumes of previously unpublished songs with Classical Vocal Reprints (2018), and most recently completing the biography Madeleine Dring: Lady Composer (2018) for Clemson University Press (US) and Liverpool University Press (UK) with Jay Rosenblatt, Professor of Musicology of the University of Arizona. For this work, they have received very positive reviews.

Dr. Brister taught at the Orfeo Music Festival in Vipiteno, Italy 2010-2015, and was a member of the Schlern International Music Festival for four seasons. In New York she has performed three operas, three oratorios, and a solo recital at Carnegie Hall, a concert at Weill Recital Hall, two quartet concerts at Tully Hall, and Handel’s Messiah at Avery Fisher Hall. She has performed with orchestras and opera companies in Baltimore, Charleston, WV, Lafayette, LA, Miami, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Stamford, CT, St Louis, Waco and other cities throughout the United States. She has also been a guest at festivals in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro), Bulgaria (Varna Fest), Birmingham (England), Germany (Steinfurt and Schwetzingen), Lithuania (Kaunas and Vilnius), and Poland (Poznan and Warszawa).

Former students sing and teach throughout the United States and Europe. In one year alone three of her students and former students were regional finalists in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, she had two semi-finalists with Classical Singer, one won the Lieder Singer Prize at AIMS, and seven students from her studio won prizes in regional NATS. They have also been winners of the International Barry Alexander International Vocal Competition, the Gerda Lissner International Vocal Competition, and George London Foundation Competition.

She was a NATS teaching Intern with James McKinney and contributes to the Journal of Singing (see Dring, Szulc, and Cras).


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