2024-25 Utah District Judges
The competitors sing for three judges who have been selected from an elite list of opera professionals (vocal coaches, career singers, opera composers, opera stage directors, heads of opera companies and artistic administrators) who are highly qualified to identify talent and to assist young singers with developing and refining their singing.
Roger Malouf
Coach,
Respiro Opera
Daniel Belcher
Baritone
Voice Faculty,
University of Houston Moores School of Music
Susanne Mentzer
Mezzo Soprano
Professor of Voice,
San Francisco
Conservatory of Music
American mezzo-soprano Susanne Mentzer has established herself not only as an international singer but also as a writer, teacher and arts advocate. Susanne is a mentor to young singers and, as she continues to occasionally perform, she feels a kinship with her students. In 2016 she joined the faculty of SFCM after 12 years in academia as a Tenured Professor at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University and Associate Professor at DePaul University in Chicago. She is also an instructor of the Adler Fellowship Program at San Francisco Opera and at Songfest at Colburn. She has been on faculty at the Aspen Music Festival and School. She regularly adjudicates competitions and serves on the Board of Directors of The Sullivan Foundation and The George London Foundation which each give awards to promising young singers. Many of Susanne’s former students are singing in leading opera houses around the world. Her stellar singing career encompasses 37 years in nearly every major opera company, orchestra and recital organization. She sang leading roles at the Metropolitan Opera since 1989. see susannementzer.com for a complete listing. Susanne was born in Philadelphia and raised in Maryland and Santa Fe, NM where she fell in love with opera as an usher. She received her Bachelor and Master degrees from The Juilliard School studying with Rose Bampton, and was trained in the Houston Opera Studio and continually with Norma Newton. She received the Alexian Brothers USA Thelan Award for her help raising over one-million dollars through gala concerts for the AIDS cause in Chicago and continues to participate in charitable events. Susanne has contributed regularly to the Huffington Post and her outspokenness about vocal health has earned her the VERA Award 2013 (Voice Education Research Awareness) from The Voice Foundation.
GRAMMY® Award-winning baritone Daniel Belcher has performed in many of the world’s music capitals, including Paris, London, New York, San Francisco, Berlin, Stuttgart, Amsterdam, Geneva, Madrid, Toronto, Montreal, Tokyo, Seoul and Houston. With a repertoire of more than 80 roles, Belcher has championed roles from the Baroque to those composed expressly for him. He came to international attention in 2004 creating the role of Prior Walter in Peter Eötvös’ Angels in America for the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris for which he was hailed by London’s The Guardian as “possessing the kind of powerhouse stuff that indicates a star in the making.”
Belcher recently created the roles of Inspector Kildare in Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell's Elizabeth Cree at Opera Philadelphia, James Addison III in Ricky Ian Gordon and Royce Vavrek's The House Without a Christmas Tree at Houston Grand Opera (recorded for a September 2018 release on the Pentatone label), Lord Bellingham in Lori Laitman's The Scarlet Letter at Opera Colorado (released on the Naxos label), Brian Castner in Jeremy Howard Beck's The Long Walk with Opera Saratoga, and Robert Kennedy in Robin de Raaff’s Waiting for Miss Monroe for his debut at The Netherlands Opera and Holland Festival. Other world premiere roles include John Brooke in Mark Adamo’s Little Women (released on the Ondine label and recorded by PBS’ Great Performances), Andy Warhol in Michael Daugherty’s Jackie O (released by Decca on the Argo label), and multiple roles in Tod Machover’s Resurrection (released on the Ondine label), all with Houston Grand Opera.
In addition to his active performing career, Belcher is a sought-after voice teacher, administrator and clinician. During his time as the Director of the Artist Diploma at William Jewell College, he developed a program designed to bridge the gap between academia and the professional performing career. His students from William Jewell have recently won numerous prizes in the Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition and performed with the Lyric Opera of Kansas City, Opera Theatre of St. Louis, Central City Opera, Opera Saratoga, Opera Maine and others.
Mr. Belcher recently joined the voice faculty at Moores School of Music, University of Houston and serves as the voice teacher for the Resident Artist Program at Opera Colorado. In the past, he has served on the faculties of the Florida State University, Hawaii Performing Arts Festival, IVAI – Tel Aviv, William Jewell, and Creative Dialogue at the Sibelius Akademie in Helsinki. His students have performed at Glimmerglass Opera, Minnesota Opera, Des Moines Metro Opera, and more. He has led master classes at USC, University of Utah, Manchester University, University of Wisconsin, and among others, as well as with the young artist programs of Portland Opera, Utah Opera, Madison Opera, Chautauqua Opera and others.
This season finds Mr. Belcher on the stages of Houston Grand Opera, Pensacola Opera and Utah Opera. In addition, he will be judging the Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition District auditions.
When Roger Malouf was an Assistant Conductor with the Metropolitan Opera, he worked on a wide range of productions led by maestros James Levine, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Simon Rattle, Lorin Maazel, Julius Rudel, Fabio Luisi, Andrew Davis, Marco Armiliato, Plácido Domingo, Joseph Colaneri, Gianandrea Noseda, and Valery Gergiev, among others. He was an Assistant Professor at Mannes College of Music, and Co-Director of the Opera Workshop in the Extension Division. He also served on the staff of New York City Opera and The Juilliard School.
As a vocal coach, Mr. Malouf was on the faculty of the Bel Canto Institute in Florence, of the American Institute for Musical Studies (AIMS) in Graz, Austria, and at the International Vocal Institute in Croatia, on the island of Hvar. He was an accompanist for the Belvedere Competition at the Vienna Chamber Opera, as well as for the Jugendfestspieltreffen at the Bayreuth Festival.
For many years, Roger has given master classes in opera for Manhattan Opera Studio and Respiro Opera NYC. Equally at home in the art song repertoire, his classes in this literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and at Portland State University’s German language immersion program, Deutsche Sommerschule am Pazifik, were well received. For the concert series at Trinity Church on Wall Street, he organized and accompanied recitals of the complete songs of Bellini and Verdi.
Mr. Malouf has conducted productions of opera and musical theater for the Natchez Opera Festival, the Little Opera Theatre of New York, Brooklyn Repertory Opera, and at Trinity Church on Wall Street. For a number of years beginning in 1995, he conducted concert performances of opera with the West Side Opera in Manhattan.
Roger has accompanied recitals in Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall. He has played for master classes given by the celebrated artists Martina Arroyo, Anna Moffo, Sherrill Milnes, Gérard Souzay, and Martial Singher. In addition to the Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition, he has been a frequent adjudicator for the Paris Opera Competition, the Wagner Society of New York, and the Altamura/Caruso Competition. Mr. Malouf studied with the distinguished musicians Aube Tzerko, Gwendolyn Koldofsky, David Garvey, and Brooks Smith in California, and with Dieter Weber and Noel Flores in Vienna.
