About Us
About Beth Parker, Classical Vocal Coach & Pianist
Beth Parker is a freelance vocal coach in Columbus Ohio. She was a mainstay of the Chicago vocal community from 2011-2020, having taught at North Park and Roosevelt Universities in Chicago. She hopes to return to her summer gig at AIMS in Graz next summer! Her coaching specialties are Italian recitative, fearless French, and bel canto style and ornamentation.
Beth has worked in opera as coach and pianist, chorus master, university lecturer, and opera workshop director over four decades. From 2003-2008 she also worked in opera administration in major gifts fundraising, marketing, and for Pittsburgh Opera as "The Opera Lady." After graduate work at Indiana University, where she spent six years working with Virginia Zeani, she apprenticed at Merola and studied with Joan Dornemann and Nico Castel from the Metropolitan Opera. While in New York she ran a YAP for Jerome Hines, accompanying for Franco Corelli, Henry Lewis, Frank Corsaro, and master classes with Marilyn Horne and other luminaries.
She also assisted the late Philip Gossett with the Rossini critical edition at the University of Chicago from 2011-2017. Her translations of scholarly papers have appeared in Opera Quarterly and the Vox Imago series in collaboration with Musicom and the Teatro alla Scala, as well as the critical editions of Rossini and Saint-Saëns with Bärenreiter.
Beth was a faculty member at UMass Amherst for 10 years, where she taught music history and theory, in addition to opera workshop and related topics. She and her husband, Peter Gutowski, moved to Columbus in November, 2020 to be closer to their grandchildren, Leo and Ali. Her cats, Leila & Taffy, are opera-tolerant and singer-friendly. Pronouns: she/her/hers.
My Soundjack.eu screen name is "parkeropera"