Sylvia McNair, soprano

Two-time Grammy Award winner and Regional Emmy Award winner Sylvia McNair lays claim to a stellar, twenty five-year career in the musical realms of opera, oratorio, cabaret and musical theater. Her journey has taken her from the Metropolitan Opera to the Salzburg Festival, from the New York Philharmonic to the Rainbow Room, from the Ravinia Festival to The Plaza, from the pages of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to the London Times. She traveled through a fierce, well-fought battle with breast cancer filled with surgeries, chemo, and radiation to end up in the trenches helping others survive.

One thing is certain about Sylvia's life odyssey — it's subject to change! "Subject To Change" is the self-descriptive title of her one-woman show heard recently at The Savoy Room at Sheldon Hall and The Colony in Palm Beach. This season, she performed with Michael Feinstein and the Carmel Symphony Orchestra to celebrate the opening of the Michael Feinstein Foundation in Indiana. And, she has been invited to judge the Second Annual Great American Songbook Academy Competition this summer. Sylvia continues to reincarnate her musical gifts in the most remarkable ways with the most rewarding results!

As a regular guest soloist with nearly all of the major American and European orchestras and opera houses, Sylvia has collaborated with an array of today's most prominent conductors including Seiji Ozawa, Kurt Masur, Leonard Slatkin, André Previn, Neville Marriner and the late Robert Shaw, the musician she credits with giving her the early and important opportunities that started her career. She has headlined at the Terrace Room at The Plaza, the Carlyle Hotel, and Feinstein's in New York.

She stopped along the way to produce over 70 recordings ranging from Mozart arias with Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St.-Martin-in-the-Fields to CDs with André Previn of music by Jerome Kern and Harold Arlen and left a beautiful audio trail documenting her incredible vocal prowess. She was thrilled to accept the invitation to sing the Bach B-minor Mass with the Vienna Philharmonic for Pope John Paul II at The Vatican, to sing for Hillary Clinton, and to perform at The U.S. Supreme Court by special invitation from Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

A proud Buckeye from Mansfield, Ohio, Sylvia earned a Masters degree with Distinction from the Indiana University School of Music, received honorary doctorates from Westminster College (1997) and Indiana University (1998), and the Ohio Governor's Award for Outstanding Achievement in Arts and Entertainment (1999). She joined the prestigious voice faculty of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University in 2006. In 2007, Sylvia received The Gaudium Award from The Breukelein Institute for "extraordinary and distinctive contributions to the arts and public life."