Bonnie Brooks

Mezzo-Soprano Bonnie Brooks has been performing in Sonoma County and the San Francisco Bay Area for over twenty years. She has appeared extensively in opera and oratorio and has performed principal roles with Pocket Opera, Cinnabar Opera Company, Northbay Opera, Sonoma City Opera, and Redwood Lyric Theater.

Brooks has performed in contemporary operas by Gian Carlo Menotti: Amahl and the Night Visitors (the Mother), The Medium (Mrs. Nolan), and most recently The Consul (Mother) and in Benjamin Brittain’s The Turn of the Screw (Miss Jessel). Other favorite roles include Venus in Offenbach’s Orpheus and the Underworld, Dorabella and Marcellina in Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte and Le Nozze Di Figaro, The Marquise of Berkenfield in Donizetti’s La Fille Du Regiment and Carmen in Bizet’s Carmen.  She was also a member of the San Francisco Opera Chorus for 12 years, singing in Puccini’s Turandot, Bizet’s Carmen, Messien’s St. Francis of Assisi, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Verdi’s Don Carlos and Aida, Saint-Saens’s Samson et Dalila, Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust, Boito’s Mefistofele, Beethoven’s Fidelio, and many others. She has also been the alto soloist with the Sonoma County Bach Choir, the Santa Rosa Symphonic Chorus, the St. Helena Chamber Singers, the College of Marin Community Chorus and the St. Cecelia’s Choir and Incarnation Orchestra.

Brooks has appeared as a soloist with symphony orchestras such as Sacramento Metropolitan Orchestra (Handel’s Messiah) and North State Symphony (Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony) as well as numerous chamber and solo recitals in churches and concert halls. She is considered to be a true “cross-over” singer with a vocal versatility that enables her to move from a dazzling operatic aria to a gutsy rhythm and blues song or to a smooth jazz ballad with equal finesse.

Her musical theater credits include roles in Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods, the title role in Kander & Ebb’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, and various musical reviews like Rogers and Hammerstein’s Some Enchanted Evening and Gershwin’s Fascinating Rhythms. She also appeared with the Santa Rosa Symphony in the Green Music Festival’s July 4th Pops Concert singing songs from South Pacific. In the late 1980s, she performed at the Russian River Jazz Festival and the Cotati Jazz Festival with the vocal jazz trio “Savvy” and over the years has been a jazz vocalist appearing in local clubs. She released a CD, You Are the Song in Me in 2012.

Brooks is a well-known and respected voice instructor and coach, with her private studio located in Sebastopol, CA. From 2008-2013, she was on the adjunct vocal faculty at Sonoma State University. She is co-founder, former board member, and current member of the National Association of Teachers of Singing. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Music from Kenyon College in Ohio and studied voice at the Mozarteum Conservatory of Music in Salzburg, Austria.