Hargis, Ellen

Ellen Hargis

Soprano Ellen Hargis is a specialist in baroque music and a leading voice teacher and lecturer on historical performance practice. She has been a guest lecturer on historical performance, baroque gesture and movement, rhetoric, and opera at Harvard, Yale, The Juilliard School of Music, the Oberlin Conservatory, and the Eastman School of Music, and The Moscow Conservatory, among others.  As a soprano, Ms. Hargis has appeared with many renowned conductors, including Andrew Parrott, Gustav Leonhardt, Paul Goodwin, Jane Glover, and Nicolas Kraemer. She performed world-wide in recital with her duo partner, lutenist Paul O'Dette, and has sung with The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Portland Baroque Orchestra, Philharmonia Baroque, Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, the Seattle Baroque Orchestra, and the Mark Morris Dance Group. Ms. Hargis is also known as a stage director specializing in historical opera and has a long-standing collaboration with the Boston Early Music Festival where serves as Assistant Stage Director and the translator of many libretti for their mainstage productions. A prolific recording artist, her discography of more than 50 recordings embraces repertoire from medieval to contemporary music and boasts the Grand Prix du Disque, the Choc du Monde, and two Grammy nominations for best opera recording.   Ellen Hargis teaches voice for the Graduate Program in Historical Performance at Case Western University.  She served as Artistic co-director of Chicago’s Newberry Consort from 2008 to 2022, and is a 2022 recipient of the Howard Mayer Brown Award for Lifetime Achievement in Early Music.

Ellen Hargis teaches voice at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and is Artist-in-Residence with the Newberry Consort at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University.