Meet the Soloists
Veronica Siebert, mezzo-soprano
Mezzo-Soprano Veronica Siebert is a current Cafritz Young Artist with the Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center, where she will perform Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro, Betty Paris in The Crucible, The Consultant in the premiere of The Curse of the Magi, and Miss Todd in The Old Maid and the Thief. As a former Ader Emerging Artist with Charlottesville Opera, Veronica already feels at home Charlottesville and is excited to return to The Paramount stage this December with The Oratorio Society for Saint-Saëns’ Christmas Oratorio.
This season, Veronica appears with the Cathedral Choral Society in Mozart’s Requiem.. In 2024, she was a Fellow at the Ravinia Steans Music Institute and a Gerdine Young Artist at Opera Theater of Saint Louis, where she returned in 2025, covering Hermia and performing Mustardseed in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She has performed Rosa Saks in the world premiere of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Olga in Eugene Onegin, both at IU, was a soloist in de Falla’s Three-Cornered Hat with the Indianapolis Symphony, and performed with the Dallas Opera’s Hart Institute. Veronica is a recipient of the Carolyn Bailey Argento Fellowship from the NOA, OTSL’s Richard Gaddes Career Award (‘25) and Barbara and Stanley Richman Career Development award (‘24), Second Place at the Met-Laffont SE Regionals, and was winner of the Met-Laffont TN Districts.
Brian Thorsett, tenor
Hailed as “a strikingly gifted tenor, with a deeply moving, unblemished voice” (sfmusicjournal.com), tenor Brian Thorsett has been seen in over 100 diverse operatic roles and fosters a stylistically diversified repertoire of over 300 concert works, which have taken him to concert halls across the US and Europe. An avid recitalist, Brian is closely associated with expanding the vocal-chamber genre and has been involved in premieres and commissions of Ian Venables, Hilary Tann, David Conte, Gordon Getty, Christopher Stark, Eric Choate and Shinji Eshima, among many others. His dedication to this project has resulted in over 200 new works in the past 10 years. Brian can also be heard in recordings, commercials and movies as the voice for SoundIron’s library Voice of Rapture: Tenor. Among his CD/Digital releases are Nature, Love and Death - orchestral song cycles by American composers, settings of Tennyson on Splendid Tears, song cycles of David Conte Everyone Sang, Scott Gendel’s Barbara Allen, an album of vocal chamber music October Skies, Daron Hagen’s Rapture and Regret, and an album with System of a Down frontman Serj Tankian Invocations and a Christmas Album with New Trinity Baroque. He also co-wrote and edited the book, The Songs of Frank E Tours. He is a graduate of San Francisco Opera’s Merola Program, Glimmerglass Opera’s Young American Artist program, American Bach Soloists’ Academy, the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme at Aldeburgh, England and spent two summers at the Music Academy of the West. Brian is currently Associate Professor of Voice at the School of Performing Arts at Virginia Tech.