Richard Best
Professor Emeritus
rbest@siu.edu
Richard Best is a native of Illinois having spent his childhood growing up in Chicago. Although he was originally trained to be a professional pianist and organist, early successes as a boy soprano and later as a bass convinced him to take up the mantel of a professional singer. After a three year stint in the United States Army, and at the age of 22, he won his first major vocal competition--the Chicagoland Music Festival "Best Male Singer"--and his operatic debut in the role of Zuniga in Bizet's Carmen with the Grant Park Symphony Orchestra in Chicago. Mr. Best subsequently went on to sing leading roles as a bass with major opera companies and orchestras world wide.
In the United States these companies include the Metropolitan Opera Association (in the Studio for four years and with the Main Company for twelve years), the Santa Fe Opera (ten seasons), the Lyric Opera of Chicago (seven seasons), the Seattle Opera (four seasons), the San Francisco Opera, the Philadelphia Opera, Opera Theater of St. Louis (three seasons) and many others. European opera companies where he was engaged as a leading bass include (among others) the Graz, Austria Opera (four seasons), Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Dusseldorf (two seasons), Dresden, Germany Opera (two seasons), Amsterdam Opera, and the Paris Opera. Mr. Best was the first American to have sung the role of Baron Ochs in Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier at the Met, Dresden, in Tokyo, in Boston, and in Austria.
Orchestras with which Mr. Best has appeared as a principal bass include the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Boston Symphony, the Toronto Symphony, the St. Louis Symphony, the Minneapolis Orchestra, the National Symphony, and the Dresden Staatskapelle.
Other honors include being recipient of two major Martha Baird Rockefeller Grants for vocal studies, being designated as a "rising young singer" in Newsweek magazine; twice a finalist in the Metropolitan Opera Regional Auditions, featured in Who's Who in America and Who's Who in Opera, and co-founder of MOMS (the Metropolitan Opera Madrigals Singers) featured in three commercial recordings.
Mr. Best is currently a Professor of Voice at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. There he created the vocal seminar now in its third season, "Five Days in May", which has included guest teachers Sherrill Milnes, Mignon Dunn, and Joan Dornemann. He has also been a Visiting Professor at Webster Conservatory in St. Louis and at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. During the summer Mr. Best regularly teaches in Italy and Austria with the American Institute of Musical Studies, the International Institute of Vocal Arts, and the Salzburg extension of the University of Miami. Mr. Best was a student of the Metropolitan Opera soprano, Margaret Harshaw. He has numerous students from "soprano to bass" currently singing with many major opera companies here and abroad.
