Janet Rabe-Meyer, mezzo-soprano

Janet Rabe-Meyer received her Bachelor of Music and Master of Music in Opera Performance from the North Carolina School of the Arts.  She continued her training as an apprentice with the Sarasota Opera and the Natchez Opera Festival.  The mezzo-soprano repertoire has allowed Ms.  Rabe-Meyer to become a very versatile actress. She has played some of Opera's leading men as the "pants roles", including the title roles of Handel's Giulio Cesare and Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel. Her repertoire also includes the bad girls Carmen and Maddalena from Rigoletto.

During the 2002-2003 season, Ms. Rabe-Meyer's "rich voice and intense acting" brought her success as Suzuki in Madama Butterfly with First Coast Opera, and earned her a reprise of that role in July of 2003 with the Delaware Valley Opera in New York. Her season also included Lola in Cavalleria Rusticana with New York's Amato Opera, and the Alto Soloist in Handel's Messiah with the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Maestro Fabio Mechetti.

Performing some of the world's finest music has made Janet a citizen of the World as well as a time traveler of sorts.  She was thrilled to perform Mozart's music in his homeland of Austria surrounded by Baroque architecture, but it was even more interesting to sing Marcellina opposite a Korean Figaro in the State Theater of Slovakia surrounded by large gray reminders of the more recent, Soviet past.  Gilbert and Sullivan's character of Little Buttercup put Janet in the heart of the Antebellum South on Natchez Opera Festival's main stage. 

Future engagements include Marcellina in Le Nozze di Figaro March 2006 produced by Orlando Opera's Second Stage; Luisa Fernanda in Zarzuela! and Hansel in Hansel and Gretel, both on tour as an Orlando Opera Studio Artist.

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