Soprano Rebecca Plack has given solo concerts on both sides of the Atlantic: at the International Great Romantics Festival in Hamilton, Canada and the ATERForum Festival in Ferrara, Italy, and in London and Budapest as winner of the 2004 Los Angeles International Liszt Competition, and for Stanford University’s prestigious Shenson series. On the operatic stage, she has performed leading and featured roles with Sacramento Opera and Ithaca Opera, as well as with the Aspen Opera Center. Her repertoire includes the title roles in Handel’s Semele and Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea, Donna Anna in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Mary Turner in Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing; she was also featured in Lully’s Le Carnavale Masquerade with lutenist Paul O’Dette. She has performed oratorios of Bach, Handel, and Haydn at the Aspen Music Festival and with the Ithaca Community Chorus, and has premiered works by composers Pierre Charvet, Giancarlo Aquilanti, Meredith Brammeier and Joseph Gregorio. Locally, she has soloed at San Francisco’s Old First Church, at the U.C. Davis Mondavi Center, and with the Chamber Music Society of Sacramento.

Dr. Plack’s training is extensive. She graduated magna cum laude in music from Princeton University, received the MM in voice from Manhattan School of Music, was awarded the Post Graduate Diploma in Voice from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and completed the PhD in Musicology at Cornell University. She was awarded a fellowship to the Aspen Music Festival’s Vocal Chamber Music program, and was twice a member of the Aspen Opera Theatre Center as well. As a researcher specializing in Lieder performance, Rebecca received an Edison Fellowship to study early recordings at the British Library. Her combined expertise in singing and musicology led to her PhD dissertation, “The Substance of Style: How Singing Creates Sound in Lieder Recordings, 1898-1948.”

Dr. Plack’s passions for music, performance and the art of singing coalesce in her teaching. She assisted in teaching Baroque ornamentation and Italian diction in the early years of Manhattan School of Music’s Handel Project; later, at Cornell, she taught subjects ranging from opera to rock’n’roll, created a first-year writing seminar on the topic of musical virtuosity and also taught singing for the first time. Since 2009, she has served on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she teaches courses on opera recordings, Lieder, and vocal pedagogy. She has both performed and presented her scholarly work at local and national meetings of the American Musicological Society, and has given guest lectures at Oxford University, Stanford University, the British Library and King’s College, London, as well as at the Vancouver International Song Institute. Her studio is located in Davis, California, where she lives with her husband.