Virginia Dupuy

Virginia Dupuy has earned a reputation as one of the finest recital and concert singers in the United States. She has championed American music in recordings of the Grammy-nominated Voces Americanas, and she premiered the role of “Crone” in Conrad Susa’s opera Wise Women. Fanfare magazine hailed her recording of Dominick Argento’s Pulitzer Prize winner From the Diary of Virginia Woolf as one of the top classical recordings of the year. Dupuy made her Lincoln Center debut with the American Symphony Orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall and has appeared with the orchestras of Pittsburgh, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth, Eugene and Honolulu. A professor of music at SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts, she is a leading scholar and interpreter of music set to Emily Dickinson’s texts. Gasparo Records, Inc. released Dwell in Possibility, a CD of 24 Dickinson poems and one letter performed by Dupuy with Shields-Collins Bray of Voices of Change, set to music by her esteemed friends, including Jake Heggie, Lee Hoiby, Dan Welcher, Richard Hundley, Simon Sargon and William Jordan. She continued her performances of contemporary composers with Voices of Change and the Cliburn Modern Composers Concerts with the composers Golijov, Danielpour, Heggie, Higdon and Bolcom present. She premiered Eudora Welty’s short story “The Whistle,” set by Crafton Beck with the Mississippi Symphony, and performed songs, duets and arias of Dvorak with the Georgetown Symphony Society’s 2009 Festival. Also with Jake Heggie, she sang songs and duets, including texts of Sister Helen Prejean, at the Cliburn’s “Modern at the Modern” in Fort Worth with pianist and producer Shields-Collins Bray. She continues to perform “Emily Dickinson in Song” throughout the country. Her student, tenor Juan de Leon, made his Metropolitan Opera debut in October 2013. Other Dupuy students have recently won regional Metropolitan Opera auditions and are apprentices at Santa Fe Opera, Glimmerglass, Wolf Trap, Chautauqua, Des Moines, Opera North and Los Angeles Opera. Dupuy also is the liaison and founder of the Emerging Artist Program, a partnership for SMU graduate students and the Dallas Opera. In addition, she produces the summer course for singers at SMU-in-Taos. Dupuy is in demand throughout the United States as a teacher of master classes. She was named Distinguished Alumna at Southwestern University in 2001. In 2010, she produced a symposium prior to the opening of the opera by Jake Heggie at the Winspear Opera House.