Rachel Willis-Sørensen

The American soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen hails from Washington State on the U.S. West Coast. She studied at Brigham Young University and completed her training at the Houston Grand Opera Studio, where she laid the foundation for her core repertoire with roles such as Fiordiligi in Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Elsa in Wagner’s Lohengrin, the title role in Strauss’s Ariadne, and Britten’s Governess (The Turn of the Screw) and Ellen Orford (Peter Grimes). In 2010, Willis-Sørensen won the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and received the Sarah Tucker Study Grant from the Richard Tucker Music Foundation. She went on to win the Belvedere Competition in Vienna in 2012 and, in 2014, took First Prize and the Zarzuela Prize at the Operalia Competition. From 2012 to 2015, she was a permanent member of the ensemble at Dresden’s Semperoper. Since then, she has pursued an international freelance career and now appears regularly on the world’s leading stages. In the 2024-25 season, she sang Rosalinde in Die Fledermaus with Marc Minkowski and the Musiciens du Louvre and appeared as Leonora in Verdi’s Il trovatore at both the New York’s Metropolitan Opera and the Royal Opera House in London. The Berlin Staatsoper engaged her for Bellini’s Norma, while the Bavarian Staatsoper cast her as Wagner’s Elsa and as Elisabetta in Verdi’s Don Carlo. She also appeared as a guest artist at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, the Opéra national de Paris, the Vienna Staatsoper, the Grand Théâtre de Genève, and the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. In addition to her operatic work, Rachel Willis-Sørensen is an active concert performing. Her repertoire includes Mahler’s Second, Fourth, and Eighth Symphonies; Mendelssohn’s Elijah; Dvořák’s Stabat Mater; Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder; and Verdi’s Messa da Requiem. Among her signature pieces is Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, which she recorded in 2023 for Sony Classical. In 2025, Willis-Sørensen received the Beverly Sills Artist Award.

July 2025