Mezzo-soprano Margaret Mezzacappa has won the 2012 Regional Finals competition for the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions at the Kennedy Center. She will advance (along with soprano Elizabeth Zharoff) to the semi-finals in New York. The Council’s auditions are designed to discover promising young opera singers and “are considered the most prestigious in North America for singers seeking to launch an operatic career.” Margaret began her audition with a rendition of O ma lyre immortelle from Gounod’s Sapho. The judges selected Cruda sorte! from Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri as her second aria.
Mezzacappa made her Kennedy Center debut in Pro Musica Hebraica’s Spring 2010 concert, An Evening of French Jewish Music. The Washington Post lauded her “sympathetic attention to the poetry” in her performance of rare classics and newly discovered masterpieces.
Mezzacappa, from Euclid, Ohio, is a third-year resident artist of the Academy of Vocal Arts. She is the recipient of many awards and honors, including the top prize in the Licia Albanese-Puccini Foundation International Vocal Competition, and first prize in the Gerda Lissner Foundation Competition. Recently, she performed the role of Emilia in Otello with the Opera Company of Philadelphia. She holds a B.M. in Music Performance from Baldwin-Wallace College Conservatory of Music, where she sang Public Opinion in Orpheus in the Underworld, Baba in The Medium, Juno in Semele, and Mum in Albert Herring.