Elena Negruţă

Elena Negruţă is the 2023 winner of The American Prize in Vocal Performance – women in Opera (professional division), The Friedrich and Virginia Schorr Memorial Awards. She was born in the Republic of Moldova. Elena began singing as a folk artist. At 14, she won first place at the Golden Stork International Youth Talent Festival in Mykolaiv, Ukraine. She studied at the Academy of Music, Theater, and Arts in Chişinău, Moldova, where she won many other national competitions and earned the only folk music scholarship in the country. When she immigrated to the US, she profoundly fell in love with opera and started to study operatic singing. She received a full scholarship to pursue her studies as a Masters in Vocal Performance at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Music. At UIUC she discovered not only her artistic abilities as a singer but also her natural acting skills when she was cast in her first role as Lucy Brown in the Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weill, being praised in The News Gazette for her “effective and appealing singing,” which helped create “one of the most dramatic high points” in the show. After finishing her master’s degree, her vocal technique evolved, giving her the flexibility to sing multiple repertoires from baroque (the role of Cupidon in the opera King Arthur by Henry Purcell with La Nuova Aurora Opera) to more contemporary operatic music (Menotti, Andre Previn, Igor Stravinsky). She also sang as the soprano soloist in various Masses, like Mass in C-major by W. A. Mozart, and Mass in G-major by F. Schubert at the Nichols Concert Hall with the Music Institute Choral in Evanston, IL. She performed Handel’s Messiah and the Little Organ Mass by J. Haydn with the Baroque Artists of Champaign Urbana. She was invited as the soprano soloist for the Great Mass in C-minor by W. A. Mozart, performing with the UIUC singalong. She sang as the soprano soloist in A Ceremony of Carols by Benjamin Britten and in Gloria by Antonio Vivaldi with the CUCC chamber ensemble, the same church where she currently sings as the soloist. In Summer 2021, she premiered in the role of the Wicked Witch in the Kingdom of Dreams musical. In February 2022, she was honored with the selection to perform live in Savannah, Georgia at the American Traditions Vocal Collection competition. In 2023 she was the finalist for the Sinfonietta Bel Canto Competition, Downers Grove, IL, while also serving as president of the Urbana-Champaign Tuesday Morning Musical Club during the 2022-23 academic year. Elena is also known as a concert artist, performing songs in diverse languages, including Romanian, Ukrainian, Russian, Czech, Polish, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian.