Kaori Sato

Soprano Kaori Sato debuted at Carnegie Hall in John Rutter’s Magnificat with Mid-American Productions and was invited back to sing Faure’s Requiem. She was Mimi in the concert version of La Boheme with the Harrisburg, Fort Wayne, and Walla Walla Symphonies. She sang the Brahms Requiem with the Eugene Concert Choir; Verdi’s Requiem with D’Angelo Symphony; Mozart’s Concert Arias and Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 with Norwalk Symphony; and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with Youngstown Symphony. With Ensemble Intakt in Japan, she presented Mendelssohn’s Three Motets.

In Italy, she performed Rossini’s Stabat Mater and Liu in Turandot in association with the Enrico Caruso International Voice Competition (1997). At Lincoln Center, she performed Qui la voce sua soave from Bellini’s I Puritani, after winning First Prize in the 1993 Liederkranz Foundation Annual Scholarship Award Competition. She is also a first prize winner of the Queens Opera competition and a winner of both the Lici-Albanese Puccini Foundation competition and Japan International Voice Competition.

Her many operatic engagements include the title role of Cio-Cio San for Tacoma Opera, Virginia Opera, Palm Beach Opera, and Cleveland Opera, among others; the role Liu in the Opera Memphis/Nashville Opera production of Puccini’s Turandot; the role of La Contessa in The Marriage of Figaro with Opera Memphis; Micaela in Carmen and Miranda in The Tempest with the Dallas Opera; and Gilda in Rigoletto with the Astra Theatre in Malta and the Fresno International Grand Opera. In Manila, the Philippines, she gave a gala concert of selected opera arias and, with both the Sendai Opera in Japan and Opera Asia in New York, sang Santuzza in Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana.

Kaori Sato has been on faculty in the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College since 1998. She has appeared as a guest speaker at the Eastman School of Music and given master classes in the U.S. and Japan. She has performed a series of “lecture concerts” in Japan called “Song and Talk,” in which she sings art songs and operatic arias, interspersing them with anecdotes and insights gleaned from her experiences as a student, teacher, and professional singer living in New York.

Kaori Sato received a BM diploma from Miyagi-Gakuin Women’s University in Japan and an MM from the Mannes College of Music, where she was awarded the Clarisse B. Kampel Foundation Scholarship. While still a graduate student, Sato was on the roster of the Metropolitan Opera covering the role of Gilda in Rigoletto.