“Leonard was an audience favorite on Saturday: Her Cherubino is adorable – terrified, wanting, curious, yet delightfully funny; she displayed the surest sense of comic timing.” Robert Nott, The Santa Fe New Mexican, June 30, 2008

Leonard, 26, a native New Yorker and Juilliard graduate, returned after intermission for “Exsultate, jubilate.” There’s always some confusion in characterizing this eternally popular piece. Is it a motet? A cantata? Or, as the program note simply put it, “a small concerto for soprano and orchestra,” by turns operatic and symphonic? Whatever it is, the […]

What appeared to be a typo on the front of Saturday evening’s Spivey Hall recital booklet — Isabel Leonard’s named floated free of category yet Brian Zeger was identified as the pianist — turned out to be a statement about artistic options. A native New Yorker, Isabel Leonard made her professional opera debut last season […]

The mezzo soprano Isabel Leonard made a noteworthy Metropolitan Opera debut last fall as Stéphano in Roméo et Juliette, demonstrating a lively stage presence and a radiant lyric voice. On Friday she proved that she is also confident on the recital stage, making her New York debut at Weill Recital Hall, ably accompanied by the […]

“And making her company debut with remarkable aplomb as Stéphano was Isabel Leonard, a young Julliard graduate who sang with the assurance of one who feels completely at home on the stage, wielding an easy mezzo that went up from an amber-colored lower register to an impressive, soprano like top. It is hard to make […]