Beth Parker

Biography

Music Director and Pianist Beth Parker joined the Capital University faculty in 2022 as music director for opera and music theater. After making her music theater conducting debut with “The Light in the Piazza,” she returned for 2023 with “A New Brain.” During the pandemic she relocated from Chicago to Columbus, where she has also worked with Opera Columbus, the voice program at Otterbein, and Opera Project Columbus. She is the pianist for the New Albany Symphony Chorus, coaches at the prestigious summer institute AIMS in Graz (Austria) and writes supertitles for operas. Beth also accompanies recitals and prepares singers for their auditions and recordings at her Westerville studio. She was a mainstay of Chicago’s classical vocal community for over a decade, having taught at Roosevelt and North Park Universities. Her coaching specialties are Italian recitative, “fearless French,” and bel canto style and ornamentation. Over the years Beth has held many positions in opera as coach and pianist, chorus master, educator, writer, and administrator. After graduate work at Indiana University, she apprenticed at the Merola Program of San Francisco Opera and studied with staff from the Metropolitan Opera. While in New York she ran a young artist program for Jerome Hines, accompanying for Franco Corelli, Frank Corsaro, and master classes with Marilyn Horne and other luminaries. She also managed the Rossini critical edition at the University of Chicago. Her translations of scholarly works have appeared in several journals, Italian series, and the critical editions of Rossini and Saint-Saëns. Beth was a faculty member at UMass Amherst for 10 years, where she taught music history and theory, opera workshop, and related topics.