When Armenian American mezzo-soprano Talin Nalbandian was born in Santa Monica, California, the labor and delivery doctor said, “It looks like we’ve got an opera singer!” He was right. Nalbandian worked as an opera singer in New York for five years before she began her doctoral program (with a focus on opera performance) at the Butler School of Music at the University of Texas at Austin. She’s won multiple prizes in vocal competitions such as the Henry and Maria Holt Vocal Competition, the Burbank Philharmonic Kennings-Fischer Competition, and the Butler Opera International Competition.
Poised with her new Doctor of Musical Arts degree, Nalbandian joins the 2022-2023 Performance Today Young Artists in Residence roster.
Music has always been in Talin Nalbandian’s soul. According to her parents, she would sing herself to sleep before she ever learned how to speak. At age 3, she joined her first choir and started taking voice lessons at age six. By the time she was nine, she’d already worked with the world-renowned American conductor Kent Nagano and the incomparable Spanish opera singer Placido Domingo. Since then, Nalbandian has worked with the Virginia Opera, Des Moines Metro Opera, Sarasota Opera, and Wolf Trap Opera, among others.
Her roles include Maddalena (Rigoletto), Bianca (The Rape of Lucretia), Marcellina (Le nozze di Figaro), as well as the roles of Hansel and Sandman in Hansel and Gretel and Suzuki in Madama Butterfly. Additionally, Nalbandian sang the role of Ruby in the west coast premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain in 2019. Most recently, she was invited to sing at the 88th Capitol Legislative Opening Session in January 2023.
Nalbandian also holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Pepperdine University and a Master of Music from the Manhattan School of Music.
Nalbandian appears here in these recordings with pianist Ana Moiseeva.
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