Polish-American coloratura soprano Alexandra Nowakowski, a 2014 graduate of the University of Illinois voice major, is already a regular young singer at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House season. During the 2022-23 season, for example, he has worked as a cover for the roles of Barbara/Mrs. Latch in The Hours by Kevin Puts, from Voce dal cielo in Don Carlo and Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier. In the 2022-23 lyric season, she has also performed on other stages such as those of the Brooklyn Art Society to sing the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry and, in October, he performed a solo recital at the Palau de la Música in Barcelona as a finalist in the competition El Primer Palau. And, as a Beebe Fund grant recipient, she spent several months in Poland to record her debut album about Polish music, entitled Kraina.
Nowakowski made her Metropolitan Opera company debut in the 2021-22 season to cover Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos, Lucia in Lucia di Lammermoor and Gilda in Rigoletto. However, his debut was scheduled for the 2020-2021 season, but was cancelled due to the Covid pandemic, as was his performance at New York’s Carnegie Hall.
She made her Polish debut at a New Year’s Eve gala with the opera Bałtycka in Gdansk and, in the summer of 2021, she sang as Johanna in Sweeney Todd and La Fée de Cendrillon Viardot’s Wolf Trap Opera in Washington, D.C., where she made her debut in the summer of 2015 playing Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro. She was invited back in 2019, where she played the role of Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos to critical acclaim.
She has also been a member of the Washington National Opera’s young singers academy during the 2018-19 and 2019-20 seasons, performing the roles of Papagena and the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute at the Kennedy Center, as well as Anna Gomez’s role at the Kennedy Center, as well as Anna Gomez’s role in The Consul staged by Francesca Zambello. She also played Nannetta in scenes from Falstaff as well as Clorinda in excerpts from La Cenerentola in a concert with the WNO Orchestra under the baton of Joseph Colaneri on the Kennedy Center stage.
Nowakowski is a recent recipient of First Prize in the Columbus Cooper-Bing Opera Competition, the Partners for the Arts Competition and the Marcella Sembrich International Voice Competition with the Kosciuszko Foundation. She was also the winner of the First Prize in the Gerda Lissner Foundation Competition and the Violetta DuPont Competition. She has won other major awards from the Loren L. Zachary Society Vocal Competition and the Giulio Gari Foundation Competition and was a 2020 Second Place winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in the Mid-Atlantic Region.
