PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND
Classical soprano Andrea Holliday earned a music degree at the University of Chicago and subsequently undertook extensive private training in vocal technique, drama, poetry and foreign languages. She has been a concert soloist with many orchestral and choral organizations (see performer’s bio below); a prolific recitalist; and a regular singer in professional ensembles including Chicago Opera Theatre, Music of the Baroque, and Church of the Ascension. Ms. Holliday’s own voice teachers have included Thomas Wikman, Diane Forlano, Jeffrey Horvath and Myron Myers.
VOICE STUDIO
Ms. Holliday’s studio embraces everyone from singers to Shakespearean actors, from professional performers to complete beginners. “I am pleased to work with anyone – singer, actor, or public speaker – who is earnest about learning to use the voice more effectively,” she says. Among her specialties are onstage speech; offstage public speech; foreign languages, especially Italian; Elizabethan English; and poetics. “My singers most often choose to work on classical, folk, Broadway or cabaret music. But chanting ancient Greek is fine, too. I’m open.”
PERFORMER’S BIO
Ms. Holliday has been heard in many of the larger concert works of Mozart, Haydn, Vivaldi and Handel, and is particularly keen on the music of J.S. Bach. She has made a number of appearances with the Michigan Bach Collegium; with the Rockford Bach Chamber Choir; and in the Bach cantata programs at St. Luke’s Evangelical Church, Chicago, and Grace Lutheran Church, River Forest. She has sung for Oak Park’s Handel Week festival, and for the Downers Grove Choral Society in many works including Bach’s B minor Mass. Apart from concert work, she has sung cabaret shows and presented dozens of art-song programs at diverse venues — usually accompanied at the piano by her husband, Thomas Wikman, and featuring Romantic composers.