Possessing a voice praised by the Cleveland Plain Dealer for its “ravishing fullness,” GRAMMY® Award-winning soprano Jessica Rivera “has established herself as a singer of uncommon vocal luster and musical intelligence” (San Francisco Classical Review). The dimension and spirituality with which she infuses her performances on international concert and opera stages has garnered Ms. Rivera unique artistic collaborations with many of today’s most celebrated composers, including John Adams, Osvaldo Golijov, Gabriela Lena Frank, Jonathan Leshnoff, Nico Muhly, and Paola Prestini, and has brought her together with such esteemed conductors as Gustavo Dudamel, Sir Simon Rattle, Esa-Pekka Salonen, James Conlon, Robert Spano, Markus Stenz, Bernard Haitink, Teddy Abrams, and Michael Tilson Thomas.
Rivera opens the 2023-2024 season singing Gabriela Lena Frank’s Conquest Requiem with the Columbus Symphony, a work she performed and recorded last season with the Nashville Symphony and premiered with the Houston Symphony in 2017. She appears with the Anderson Symphony in “An Evening of Song,” gives a recital at Converse University with guitarist Sharon Isbin, and performs at the Urtext Cuarto Festival in Mexico City. She returns to Cincinnati Opera as Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni.
A champion of new music, Rivera recently gave the world premiere of Nico Muhly’s The Right of Your Senses, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and performed by the National Children’s Chorus and the American Youth Symphony at Walt Disney Concert Hall. A major voice in the rich culture of Latin American music and composers, Rivera recently performed in Antonio Lysy’s Te Amo Argentina with Arizona Friends of Chamber Music. During the 2021-2022 season, Ms. Rivera and guitarist Sharon Isbin embarked on a multi-city US tour with a program of Spanish art songs, a project the duo debuted during the 2019 Aspen Music Festival.
Rivera’s decade-long collaboration with Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra included singing Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in Spano’s farewell concert. Other highlights with Spano and the ASO include Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem and Jonathan Leshnoff’s Zohar at Carnegie Hall. She joined Spano for Strauss’s Four Last Songs and Hadyn’s Creation with the Fort Worth Symphony and for Christopher Theofanidis’s Creation/Creator in Atlanta and at the Kennedy Center. Here she also sang Robert Spano’s Hölderlin Lieder, a song cycle written specifically for her and recorded on the ASO Media label.
Recent orchestral highlights include Golijov’s La Pasión según San Marcos with the Minnesota Orchestra, Gabriela Lena Frank’s La Centinela y la Paloma with the Aspen Philharmonic, Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 at the Grand Teton Music Festival and with the Detroit Symphony, and Mozart’s Requiem with the Louisville Orchestra and the San Diego Symphony. She has sung Handel’s Messiah with the Nashville Symphony and Ottawa’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, Beethoven’s Ninth with the Atlanta and Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestras, Mahler’s Fourth with Colombia’s Orquestra Filarmónica de Bogotá, Brahms’s Requiem with the Kansas City Symphony, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Five Images After Sappho and Poulenc’s Gloria with the Colorado Symphony, Strauss’s Orchesterlieder with Orquestra Sinfónica Portuguesa, the role of Eileen in Bernstein’s Wonderful Town with Seattle Symphony, and Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 with Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Rivera has worked closely with John Adams throughout her career and received international praise portraying Kumudha in the world premiere of A Flowering Tree directed by Peter Sellars at Vienna’s New Crowned Hope Festival. Under Adams’s baton, she has sung the role with the San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Lincoln Center, and London Symphony Orchestra. She has also performed Kumudha with the Berlin Philharmonic, Teatro Nacional de São Carlos in Lisbon and Cincinnati Opera. Rivera made her European operatic debut as Kitty Oppenheimer in Sellars’s production of Adams’s Doctor Atomic with the Netherlands Opera, a role that also served for her debuts at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Finnish National Opera and Teatro de la Maestranza in Seville, Spain. She joined the roster of the Metropolitan Opera for its production of Doctor Atomic under the direction of Alan Gilbert. Rivera has also performed Nixon Tapes with the Pittsburgh Symphony; and El Niño with the Boston and Saint Louis Symphony Orchestras, San Francisco Symphony, and at the Edinburgh International Festival with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
Ms. Rivera made her Santa Fe Opera debut in the summer of 2005 as Nuria in the world premiere of the revised edition of Osvaldo Golijov's Ainadamar. She reprised the role for the 2007 GRAMMY® Award-winning Deutsche Grammophon recording of the work with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra under Robert Spano, and bowed in the Peter Sellars staging at Lincoln Center and Opera Boston, as well as in performances at the Barbican Centre, the Adelaide Festival of Arts, Cincinnati Opera, and the Ojai, Ravinia, and New Zealand International Arts Festivals. She also performed Margarita Xirgu in Ainadamar at the Colorado Music Festival and the Teatro Real in Madrid.
Rivera has appeared in recital halls in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Oklahoma City, Las Vegas and Santa Fe. She was honored to receive a commission from Carnegie Hall for the world premiere of Nico Muhly’s song cycle The Adulteress. She was recently presented by Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Society of the Four Arts, and Wolf Trap in Voices of the Americas, a program featuring works by Ginastera, Chávez, and León alongside pianist Michael Stephen Brown and cellist Nicholas Canellakis.
Rivera’s extensive discography includes releases on the Deutsche Grammophon, Nonesuch, Naxos, Telarc, Urtext, VIA Records, Opus Arte, CSO Resound, and ASO Media labels. Her performance of John Harbison’s Requiem with the Nashville Symphony and Chorus under Giancarlo Guerrero was recorded and released on the Naxos label in October 2018 and her third release for Urtext, an Homage to Victoria de los Angeles was released in 2022. Ms. Rivera serves on the vocal faculty at Miami University in Oxford, OH. jessicarivera.com
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