Karen Williams

The American soprano Karen Williams made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1985 as Serena in the company's Porgy and Bess and her recital debut at Alice Tully Hall in 1994. Oratorio and the concert repertory were the ground she worked: the Verdi Requiem at Washington National Cathedral in 1992, where a reviewer singled out her Libera me, and Beethoven's Missa solemnis with the same choral society two years later. Her stage roles included Madama Butterfly in Anchorage, Amelia in Un ballo in maschera opposite Luciano Pavarotti in Philadelphia and Donna Elvira in Miami, and she sang the title role of Thea Musgrave's Harriet, A Woman Called Moses for Virginia Opera; for Albany Records she recorded Joseph Fennimore's one-act opera Eventide together with a group of his songs. She won the Metropolitan Opera National Council auditions, the Luciano Pavarotti International Vocal Competition in Philadelphia, a Sullivan Foundation grant and first prize at the Mobil-Austria Meistersinger competition in Graz. In the 1996-97 season she sang Beethoven's Ninth with the Haifa Symphony, returning to that orchestra in 1998 for programmes drawn from Porgy and Bess. She sang in Mahler’s Eighth Symphony at the Ravinia Festival in 1987 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under James Levine.