mezzo-soprano

Mezzo-soprano Krista River has appeared as a soloist with the Boston Symphony, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the North Carolina Symphony, the Cape Cod Symphony, the Santa Fe Symphony, Handel & Haydn Society, the Florida Orchestra, the Charlotte Symphony, and the Pittsburgh Bach and Baroque Ensemble. Winner of the 2004 Concert Artists Guild International Competition and a 2007 Sullivan Foundation grant recipient, her opera roles include Dido in Dido and Aeneas, Sesto in La clemenza di Tito, Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro, Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia, Zerlina in Don Giovanni, Anna in Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins, Nancy in Britten’s Albert Herring, and the title role in Handel’s Xerxes. For Ms. River’s New York Recital debut at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, the New York Times praised her "shimmering voice…with the virtuosity of a violinist and the expressivity of an actress.” 2014-15 performances include appearances with Emmanuel Music, Boston Musica Viva, the Brooklyn Art Song Society, the Cape Ann Symphony, and Boston Baroque. Ms. River began her musical career as a cellist, earning her music degree at St. Olaf College. She resides in Boston and is a regular soloist with Emmanuel Music’s renowned Bach Cantata Series.

Performances

Jordan Hall at New England Conservatory | February 1, 2020
Jordan Hall at New England Conservatory | December 7, 2014
Distler Performance Hall at Tufts University | September 26, 2009

News and Press

[Concert Review] American Record Guide reviews Fantastic Mr. Fox

Boston's Jordan Hall was host to a concert version of Tobias Picker's 1998 setting of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox on December 7. A good-sized crowd from very young to older folks had assembled to hear Gil Rose lead his two ensembles, Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Odyssey Opera, in a costumed semi-staged performance of this "family opera". Picker prefers to use this term to describe his morality tale, fearing that "children's opera" is a term frightened with an assumption of "dumbing-down".

American Record Guide Full review
[Concert Review] Animals Cavort for Odyssey Opera

Youngsters arrived in droves for the Boston premiere of Tobias Picker’s Fantastic Mr. Fox in Sunday afternoon’s Jordan Hall collaboration among the Boston Modern Opera Project, Odyssey Opera, and the Boston Children’s Chorus (Anthony Trecek-King, director). Albeit scrubbed of the assassination, murder, or suicide that characterizes the rest of the composer’s work in the genre, Fox is not an inevitable children’s opera.

The Boston Musical Intelligencer Full review
[Concert Review] BMOP, Odyssey Opera play for the kids at Jordan Hall

Neither the Boston Modern Orchestra Project nor Odyssey Opera is well known for its children’s programming, so it was a particular pleasure to see the dozens of pint-size opera-goers filing into Jordan Hall excitedly on Sunday afternoon. The occasion was Tobias Picker’s family opera, “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” with a libretto by Donald Sturrock adapted from the story by Roald Dahl.

The Boston Globe Full review
[Concert Review] Some Angels: Opera Unlimited does Tony Kushner

Whatever anyone thinks of the actual opera, congratulations are again in order to Opera Unlimited, the collaboration between music director Gil Rose’s Opera Boston and his Boston Modern Orchestra Project, this time for bringing to Boston the American premiere of Hungarian composer Peter Eötvös’s attempt to make an opera out of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, his Pulitzer-winning play about the AIDS epidemic and the collapse of public and personal values under Reagan (one remaining performance, June 24 at the Majestic Theatre).

The Boston Phoenix Full review
[Concert Review] Soul-searching fills musical "Angels"

Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is an epic, historical, political, personal , and apocalyptic drama that is also an opera waiting to happen. It is full of larger-than-life characters who deliver long aria-speeches of interior questioning; characters meet each other in dream landscapes and there are interwoven, simultaneous episodes that resemble operatic ensembles. There is even a grand death scene.

The Boston Globe Full review