About Lissy
Known for her “beautiful” and “focused” sound (La Scena Musicale), mezzo soprano Lissy Meyerowitz has established herself as an exciting emerging artist in Toronto and beyond. She is a recent graduate from the University of Toronto’s Opera (U of T Opera) Master’s program and she gave her graduating performance at the Elgin Theatre in the role of Le prince charmant in Massenet’s Cendrillon in March 2024. She sang her role debut as Rosina in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia with Highlands Opera Studio in August 2024, where she worked with renowned artists such as Richard Margison, Valerie Kuinka, Christine Goerke and Warren Jones.
She made her opera debut as Nicklausse in the 2019 production of Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann with the Halifax Summer Opera Festival. She made her European debut in 2022 in Vicenza, Italy as La vecchia in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi with the International Lyric Academy. Her other roles include La Baronessa in Nino Rota’s Il cappello di paglia di Firenze, Petermann in Offenbach’s M. Choufleuri and 2nd woman in Arthur Benjamin’s A Tale of Two Cities.
During her undergraduate and graduate degrees at U of T, Lissy has performed in masterclasses with esteemed artists such as Stratton Visitors in Music Susan Graham, Lawrence Brownlee, Eric Owens and Will Crutchfield, as well as Elliot Madore in the 2022 Riki Turofsky Masterclass in Voice. She was a Sidgwick Scholar for the Orpheus Choir of Toronto (2022-2024) under the baton of Robert Cooper and later, Thomas Burton.
Lissy is very passionate about new music. She has had the privilege of being in two U of T Student Composer Collective operas: Disobedience (2023) as 3rd apprentice and Lysistrata (2024) as Ismenia. She has performed with the Modern Sound Collective’s Concreamus, a choir dedicated to performing new music by emerging composers. In 2024, she was a part of a workshop in collaboration with U of T Opera and Against the Grain Theatre for Ian Cusson and Royce Vavrek’s new opera Indians on Vacation. In 2023, she participated in a similar workshop with U of T Opera for Mika Karlsson and Royce Vavrek’s operatic adaptation of the film Melancholia, which premiered at the Kungliga Operan in Stolkhokm in 2023. In 2023, she premiered the role of Los in Allan Bevan’s choral composition Perfectly Mad, a captivating work based on the texts of William Blake, in semi-staged performances with the Orpheus Choir of Toronto and Chorus Niagara.
Lissy is excited to continue working with composers, emerging or established, on new works dedicated to telling beautiful and important stories.
Lissy is a proud student of Mark Daboll.
Photos by Emily Rocha