Indre Viskontas is a versatile and powerful performer,
equally at home in contemporary and classical opera. Her
"bell-like timbre" and "winsome stage presence" are
particularly suited for the leading noblewomen in operas
from the 18th and 19th centuries, while her intellect,
dramatic intensity, curiosity and nuanced acting add depth
to contemporary operatic roles.
The Lithuanian-Canadian soprano has performed roles ranging
from The Countess in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro to
the title role in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe.
Operatic performance highlights include the role of Beth in
Mark Adamo’s Little Women in a production that she
co-produced at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music,
Kate in John Estacio’s Frobisher co-commissioned by
Calgary Opera and the Banff Summer Arts Festival, Heart's
Desire in Arthur Sullivan's rarely-performed last opera,
The Rose of Persia with The Lyric Theater of San
Jose and Aurelia, in Purcell's Dioclesian. with San
Francisco Cabaret Opera. Her performance as the Water Nymph
in a new opera written by David Heuser which was based on
one of Aesop's fables, called The Golden Ax, was
selected as one of the top two performances at the ninth
annual Fresh Voices festival of contemporary music in San
Francisco. She also created the role of Irena in Patrick
Dailly's Solidarity, the world-premiere of which was
performed in Berkeley with the San Francisco Cabaret Opera
in 2009. In 2010, she created the lead role of Dora in a
workshop premiere of Felsenfeld's The Bloody Chamber
at the Live Oak Theater in Berkeley, CA and the Galapagos
Art Center in Brooklyn, NY, and was hailed as "the musical
highlight of the evening" by the Opera Insider. Also in
2010, she created the role of Amelia in excerpts from
Giancarlo Aquilanti’s opera Oxford Companions with
the Stanford Orchestra in the Dinkelspiel Auditorium in
Palo Alto, CA. At the forefront of the underground movement
to revitalize classical music and bring opera to a wide
audience, Indre founded the San Francisco chapter of
Opera on Tap in the summer of 2011. A national
organization designed to tear down the stereotype of opera
as elitist, stuffy and boring, Opera on Tap produces
accessible, contemporary and fun performances of operatic
music in non-traditional venues such as cafes, art
galleries and bars. Along with Katherine Gerber-Biswas, she
manages the troupe and can be heard both as the host and as
a soloist during monthly performances at Cafe Royale
and elsewhere.
Miss Viskontas is also an avid performer of chamber music,
and a co-founder of Vocallective, a collective of
singers and instrumentalists dedicated to the art of
Vocal Chamber music. She is also a regular soloist with
Classical Revolution. In March of 2011, she
performed the West Coast premiere of Mohammed Fairouz’s
Three Fragments of Ibn Khafajah at Adaiha
MacAdam-Somer’s staff recital at the San Francisco
Conservatory of Music. She also performed the piece at
the Joyce SoHo on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11
terrorist attacks during a marathon concert of music
written after September 11th, 2001 by Manhattan-based
composers. In 2009, she premiered Josh
Archibald-Seiffer's Wat vör shöön Vagel with the
Stanford New Ensemble under the baton of Martin Fraile.
Past performances include Mendelssohn's Opus 34
with Allison Lovejoy, an improvisational opera called
Spontaneous Combustion by Jorge Molina for voice,
piano, percussion, and guitar, and Osvaldo Golijov’s
Lua Descolorida and How slow the wind for
voice and strings as part of the Mission Arts
Performance Project. In a previous MAPP honoring the art
of Frida Kahlo and co-sponsored by SFMoma, she performed
her own original composition based on the poetry of
Rosalia de Castro. She has had the pleasure of working
with Mr. Golijov on Lua Descolorida during the
Banff Summer Arts Festival in 2007.
In 2009, Miss Viskontas attended the Opera en Creation
workshop for emerging professionals in opera at the
world-reknowned festival in Aix-en-Provence. Designed to
foster the production of new works in opera, this workshop
brought together 12 directors, conductors and composers,
who spent two weeks working on various projects. Following
her sojourn in the south of France, Miss Viskontas
performed in the Accademia d'Amore baroque opera workshop,
which culminated in the performance of staged opera scenes
with period instruments in Seattle.
Based in San Francisco, Miss Viskontas holds a Master of
Music degree from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music,
a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Cognitive Neuroscience
from the University of California, Los Angeles and a
Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Toronto.
She has published more than 30 original papers and chapters
related to the neural basis of memory and creativity. For
more information on her scientific endeavors, click on the
‘science’ tab at the top of this page. Indre is also the
co-star in six episodes of a new television show called
Miracle Detectives which aired in the winter of 2011
on The Oprah Winfrey Network.