Robin Fisher, lyric coloratura soprano, has performed to critical acclaim in such cities as Paris, Vienna, Prague, Hamburg, Chicago and Dallas. Press reviews remark on her “amazingly precise coloratura, melting diminuendi, splendid high notes and delightful musicality” (Opernwelt) and her “mature timbre and total self-assurance…. an extremely exciting singer-actress” (Westdeutsche Zeitung).
On the opera stage, she appeared recently as Susanna in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro with Sacramento Opera and as Pamina in The Magic Flute with Townsend Opera Players. In concert, she was a featured soloist with regional ensembles such as the Auburn Symphony in Messiah, with Camerata Capistrano in the Bravo Bach! Festival, in Elijah with the U.C. Davis Symphony, and in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the Folsom Symphony. At the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts (Davis, CA) in Mendelssohn's Lobgesang Symphony with the Sacramento Choral Society & Orchestra, the Sacramento Bee critic found “Soprano soloist Robin Fisher was thrilling…”
Ms. Fisher's many recital appearances in both Europe and the United States attest to her love for the art song. She has recorded chamber works for flute and soprano with Laurel Zucker (The Nightingale Sings), and a compact disc recording of sacred American art songs in collaboration with pianist Dalton Baldwin was issued in 2003 (God be in my Heart). National Public Radio broadcast an interview and concert excerpts in 2002 from her lecture-recital series “Poetry and Music in the American Art Song.” Austrian Radio recorded her world premiere performance of several avant-garde works from the Styrian Fall Festival, and Swiss Radio invited Ms. Fisher to record Mozart lieder accompanied by fortepiano for broadcast during a Mozart festival.
A new edition of American Art Song & American Poetry, co-authored with scholar Ruth Friedberg, was published in 2012 with a foreword by baritone Thomas Hampson. Together with Friedberg, Ms. Fisher also published The Selected Writings of John Duke in 2007 with a foreword by Ned Rorem.
Ms. Fisher won both the prestigious Fulbright-Hayes Scholarship and a Rotary Foundation Award to pursue studies in Europe, and received the coveted Artist's Diploma cum laude from the University of Vienna. She holds a D.M.A. degree from the University of Texas at Austin. A native of California, she began her vocal studies at San José State University. Her students have won vocal competitions and are active performers and teachers throughout the United States. Ms. Fisher is Professor of Voice in the Sacramento State School of Music, and Director of Lingua e Canto, a summer program for young opera singers in Italy.