Susanna Phillips

Born in Birmingham, Alabama and raised in Huntsville, Susanna Phillips studied at the Juilliard School, where she continues to work with Cynthia Hoffmann. She is a graduate of Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Ryan Opera Center.

The 2016-17 season sees Ms. Phillips return to the Metropolitan Opera for her ninth season, starring as Clémence in the Met premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de Loin and as Musetta in La Bohème. She makes her Zurich Opera debut as Donna Anna in Don Giovanni and she also appears as Cleopatra in Handel’s Giulio Cesare with Boston Baroque. Ms. Phillips’s orchestra engagements this season include Mozart’s Exsultate, jubilate and his Mass in C minor with Music of the Baroque, Britten’s War Requiem with Oratorio Society of New York, as well as Euridice in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice with the Atlanta Symphony. Ms. Phillips will also perform recitals at the Celebrity Series of Boston, the National Museum for Women in the Arts, and her popular dual recital program with Eric Owens at Carnegie Hall and the Washington Performing Arts.

Last season saw Ms. Phillips return to the Metropolitan Opera as Rosalinde in Die Fledermaus and Musetta in La Bohème. Additional engagements included a return to the stage of Lyric Opera of Chicago as Juliette in Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet, the Filas Requiem with Oratorio Society of New York, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony with the Saint Louis Symphony, Beethoven’s Missa solemnis with the Sydney Symphony, as well as a recital at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Brian Zeger.

In 2005 Ms. Phillips won four of the world’s leading vocal competitions: Operalia, the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, the MacAllister Awards, and the George London Foundation Awards Competition. She also claimed the top honor at the Marilyn Horne Foundation Competition. Her first solo album, Paysages, is available on Bridge Records. 

In chamber music, Ms. Phillips has teamed for recitals with bass-baritone Eric Owens, violist Paul Neubauer and pianist Anne Marie McDermott, the Emerson String Quartet with Warren Jones, and at Twickenham Fest, a chamber music festival she co-founded in her native Huntsville, Alabama. Ms. Phillips made her San Francisco Symphony debut in 2012 and has returned several times since, most recently in Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 in October 2015.

(September 2016)