Soprano Bianca Hall holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Early
Music Vocal Performance from University of Southern California, Thornton School
of Music, where her secondary fields of emphasis were Theory and Analysis,
College Teaching, and Recorder Performance. She also holds both Master of Music
and Bachelor of Music degrees in vocal performance both from California State
University Fullerton, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Physiological Science
with an English minor from University of California, Los Angeles.
Bianca joined the Old Dominion University music faculty as
Early Music Lecturer in Fall 2015. In addition to directing the Madrigal
Singers, she also directs the Collegium Musicum ensemble, which is an
instrumental ensemble that specializes in playing music from 1750 and earlier
in an historically informed manner on replicas of historical instruments, like
the baroque recorder, viola da gamba, harpsichord, portative organ, and lute.
Bianca also teaches courses in Music History.
Outside of ODU, Bianca serves as voice faculty and assistant director of the
San Francisco Early Music Society's Medieval & Renaissance Workshop,
performs and records as a soloist and chamber singer throughout the country,
and gives lessons, coachings, and workshops for voice and recorder. She
specializes in the performance of seventeenth-century Italian florid singing
and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English balladry and has presented
scholarly papers on both subjects both nationally and internationally.
Bianca is an active early music performer and has performed
in various festivals and concert series around the country, including the
Boston and Berkeley Early Music Festivals and Pittsburgh's Renaissance and
Baroque Society concert series. She has performed with various ensembles,
including Norfolk Chamber Consort, Tallis Chapel Society, Bach Collegium San
Diego, De Angelis Vocal Ensemble, Tesserae, Ciaramella, and Pacific Bach
Project. In addition to her ensemble work, Bianca has performed the roles of
Drusilla (Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea), Cherubino (Mozart's The
Marriage of Figaro) and Dido and the Sorceress (Purcell's Dido and Aeneas). In
the realm of contemporary music, she performed in the L.A. Microfest in 2011
and at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles as part of the Made in L.A. 2012
exhibition.
Bianca’s recordings include "D'ye Hear the News,"
music to accompany 1688: The First Modern Revolution (Yale University Press,
2011), "J.S. Bach: The Six Motets BWV 225-230" with Bach Collegium
San Diego (RMAP, 2010), and "Ancient Christmas Melodies" (Virlouise
Records, 2006).