Born in Québec, pianist Sylvie Beaudette’s expansive career includes work and performing as a collaborative artist, vocal and chamber music coach, teacher, and arts administrator. She has performed with several artists and groups in Canada, USA, and Switzerland. As a member of the Athena Trio, she performed extensively in Northern California, Pennsylvania and New York States, and recorded Fabulous Femmes, a CD of music by women composers released on the Centaur label in July 2000. She has also appeared on clarinetist Richard Nunemaker’s critically acclaimed CD Multiplicities. With soprano Eileen Strempel, she performed in New York City, Rochester, Syracuse, Boston, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Toronto, and Montréal. Their most celebrated recording: (In)habitation: Settings of Margaret Atwood Poetry by American Women Composers, was released in 2009 by Centaur Records. The disc features songs composed expressly for the duo by some of the top female composers of our time. The Journal of Singing raved about this recording saying, “exemplary; there is so much to admire about how this project was conceived and executed down to the smallest detail (…). A remarkable achievement.”

The Strempel-Beaudette Duo’s other recordings include love lies bleeding, a collection of art songs by Libby Larsen, as well as unto thee I burn, a new CD released in 2015 that includes nineteen song settings of e.e. cummings poetry by North American women composers. The duo’s first disc, With All My Soul, is on the Oasis label and features previously unrecorded works by Marie de Grandval, along with mélodies by Lili Boulanger and Pauline Viardot-Garcia.

Sylvie Beaudette has given guest lectures on the history of French mélodie in Lausanne, Switzerland and at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland. As diction coach, Dr. Beaudette has worked at the Houston Grand Opera in preparation for Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment and several years at the Université de Sherbrooke, Québec where she taught lyric diction to master’s degree candidates in Choral Conducting. Dr. Beaudette worked as a piano faculty member at Syracuse University, and at California State University at Chico, where she created an undergraduate program in Piano Accompanying for the Music Department. She was awarded the 2007 citation from the New York State Music Teachers Association for her musical contributions as a whole as well as her service to the organization as chair of the Commissioned Composer program. Dr. Beaudette is currently working at the Eastman School of Music as Assistant Professor of Chamber Music and as coordinator of the community engagement program Music For All. She is the founder and artistic director of Eastman’s Women in Music Festival (2004-2014). Since 2011, she has served on the board of the Rochester Fringe Festival and, from 2018 to 2023 was co-chair of the Eastman Centennial Planning Committee.

A graduate from the Eastman School of Music, Arizona State University, McGill University, and Goucher College, Sylvie Beaudette’s teachers and mentors include: Jean Barr, Eckart Sellheim, Lois McLeod, Robert Roux, Helmut Blume, Michael McMahon, Lorette Codère-Brunelle, et Viviane Pépin.

Music For All’s website:  www.esm.rochester.edu/chamber/musicforall/
Women in Music Festival’s website: www.esm.rochester.edu/wmf
Rochester Fringe Festival’s website: www.rochesterfringe.com

Reviews

“Sylvie Beaudette demonstrates breathtaking expertise and a perpetual supply of hue and nuance that accentuates and complements Strempel in countless ways.” Stephanie Tingler, about the (In)habitation CD, Journal of the Society for American Music

BEAUDETTE CV 2024