Ilana Zarankin

Described as possessing a voice capable of “vaulting to vertiginous heights” (The New York Times), with “bell-like high notes” (OperaRamblings), soprano Ilana Zarankin is
a graduate of Dawn Upshaw’s Bard College Graduate Vocal Arts Program in NY. After five years living and working in Brooklyn, Ilana moved back to Toronto in late 2014
and has since made her debut with Talisker Players, New Music Concerts, ArrayMusic and Opera In Concert. She was also the co-artistic director (with her husband jazz
drummer Nico Dann) of a two-concert Off Centre Music Salon offshoot series entitled dérangé, co-presented in 2015 and 2016 by the Music Gallery. Ilana’s 2014 Banff Centre
Winter Music Residency was spent studying the works of Elliott Carter with American New Music champion, soprano Lucy Shelton. In 2012 she was a Vocal Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Festival, where she performed a centennial celebration performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, and the roles of Potted Plant, Baby and Mother Goose in Oliver Knussen’s Higglety Pigglety Pop! to great critical acclaim. In 2011, Ilana made her Carnegie Hall (Weill Hall) debut in a World Premiere of a song-cycle by Christopher Mayo. Ilana has been a member of Canadian Opera Company Chorus since 2015 and is also the Russian Lyric Diction coach for the artists of the COC Ensemble Studio and for the recent COC productions of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and the 2018 production of Stravinsky’s The Nightingale, as well as for the graduate voice students at the Royal Conservatory of Music.