Sanjana Priyonti, Junior Editor
As high notes of opera reverberated through the corridors in Guerry Auditorium, I stood spellbound. Though I had no clue what the song meant, the intensity of that voice captivated me instantly.
That same voice lights up top stages from London to Paris and Vienna, in opera houses across Spain, Germany, Italy, the U.S. and beyond. Now it mesmerised anyone who happened down the second-floor hallway of Guerry Auditorium. Mathew Polenzani’s powerful tenor filled the Sewanee choir’s practice room, Laura Brooks Rice listened intently from behind a piano; she nodded, furiously whenever Polenzani’s exquisite singing reached the level of perfection she wanted to hear.
The New York Metropolitan Opera’s Polenzani, one of today’s most distinguished lyric tenors and operatic talents says he has worked with Rice for more than 27 years and finds himself checking in with her whenever he can. Rice describes Polenzani as the Tom Brady of the world’s current tenors. Polenzani says of Rice: “I would go wherever she is.”
Rice has drawn Opera stars and aspiring singers alike to Sewanee for years, even as she regularly travels to coach opera companies in Montreal, Chattanooga and Atlanta. She is the founder and director of OperaFest Sewanee, a summer music intensive that has produced great opera singers and reignited the zeal for opera among many young singers.
A distinguished mezzo-soprano singer for 19 years and opera teacher for the past 35 years, Rice first taught at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1985. From 2012 to2016, she spent summers on the faculty of the distinguished International Vocal Arts Institute (IVAI) in Montreal, Virginia and New York. She has also taught at Santa Fe Opera and at the Bel Canto Institute in San Miguel, Mexico, and in prestigious programs such as the Cafritz Young Artist program at The Kennedy Center, the Atlanta Opera.
Given her teaching experience across the United States and around the world, it might seem surprising that she chose to bring her talents to Sewanee, but Rice says her family has deep roots in Sewanee and it has always felt like home.
“My father and brother went to Sewanee for college, but I couldn’t. Still, my family is from here, so it’s where I chose to settle. I’ve got a lot of roots here,” she told The Sewanee Purple. “Did you see the Playmate statue in Abbo’s Alley? That’s my mother and her playmates.”
This personal connection to the place, coupled with her love for opera, led to the formation of OperaFest Sewanee. Rice said that happened through a chance encounter and an email to the then-director of Sewanee Music Festival, who urged her to form the new branch of OperaFest Sewanee.
During COVID, 70 students joined the program online. Under Rice’s direction, it offered private coaching, masterclasses, various performance opportunities and workshops exploring professional learning. Taking and teaching classes on Zoom and over FaceTime comes with challenges, especially for something as intricate as singing and listening to the intricacies of classical opera..
Rice said her ability to listen and coach online was strengthened by an encounter with the earliest commercial recording technology – Thomas Edison’s wax cylinder. When she took students to a museum and one of her singers was recorded on a working wax-cylinder machine, she said, she noticed the purity of voice captured by the device and began listening for that same pure quality in her coaching sessions. “Hearing my own student on the wax cylinder made me know what to listen to,” Rice said. “That was just the core of the voice.”
Rice’s intense listening ability was on display during Polenzani’s coaching sessions on the mountain earlier this year. During each session, Rice would listen, nod, stop Polenzani and offer minute instructions – to open his throat differently, to subtly tweak the pronunciation of a single letter, or to make tiny adjustments in the energy of a phrase. “She can say something that will click…one way, then another way, ‘let’s try this scale, I need you to think of it another way,’” Polenzani said, “until I get it and then the sound comes out I know it and she knows it. …This is the great gift that she’s got.”
Rice and Polenzani have worked regularly over Zoom and Facetime, Rice would often rush to New York to see him perform. As compared to the bustling crowd of New York and all the European venues he has performed in, Polenzani said,“Sewanee’s slow and calming environment” helped him just to focus on his art.
When Polenzani started practicing Mozart’s Idomeneo and Puccini’s La bohème in Guerry Hall’s Choir practice room, the magic that his voice holds demonstrated how his collaboration with Rice has helped him improve. “I want to extend my career and I depend on her ears to help me keep that dream sort of going.” said Polenzani.
Rice said the calming environment of Sewanee that Polenzani admired has been a plus for all of her students. Here, artists can focus on their performances and nothing else. She said she tries to encourage her students to take advantage of Sewanee’s beauty and quiet from the start of each Operafest by reading a favorite quote from Tennessee Williams: “I’m afraid that we worry too much about the progression of our careers and our bank accounts, and not so much about the progression of our talents or of the theatre at large.”
Rice curates personalized learning experiences for each of her students, tending to their weaknesses and strengths, in much the same way that small liberal arts classes at the college allow students to interact closely with professors to learn both in and out of the classroom. Polenzani said he experienced that similarity firsthand during his time on the Mountain, alternating between long practice sessions and playing golf – a parallel to Sewanee students’ work-hard, play-hard tradition.
Among Operafests’s first students and its biggest success stories is Kathleen “Katie” O’Mara – winner of Operalia ’24 in Mumbai, India, who just had her debut at the Met 2 weeks ago on April 16, 2025. Operalia is widely considered the world’s most prestigious contest for up and coming opera singers.
O’Mara told The Sewanee Purple that she regained her confidence to perform on stage after she came to the OperaFest in Sewanee. Being in New York, she said, where “someone’s always listening and judging,” the consequences of not living up to her own performing expectations were grave. After extensively working with Rice and her performance coach at Sewanee, she got back on stage and felt ready for auditions.
“It was necessary to go somewhere where I could perform without a lot of consequences and I got my audition package in shape and built my confidence back up and when all of that felt better and a little easier, I was performing better,” she said. “Sewanee’s nurturing environment helped me be a better performer.”
O’Mara said she continues to check back in with Rice and uses the skills learned from her to prepare for new roles. “I am often using the tools and techniques that she’s taught me to prepare for these roles” she said.“ It’s nice to sing my rep for my first voice teacher ever.”
O’Mara will perform The Barber of Seville at the Met until June of this year, and she has a tour planned for Berkshire Opera Festival and a lineup scheduled for next year.
Rice and Sewanee’s influence have also attracted students from abroad. Jaclyn Grossman, hailing from Toronto, Canada, was struggling to find a coach who could help her overcome vocal challenges until she met Rice.
Grossman said being at OperaFest brought her a new perspective, and the lessons from Rice helped her performances. “It took me about 10 years to find someone, Laura, who could really do what I needed,” Grossman said. Working with Rice, who is part of a world-renowned and longstanding lineage of teachers, she said, we do as many takes as needed, sometimes even 12, until it finally clicks.”
After coming to Sewanee, Grossman said, she got to know the unique way her voice can work. She is now preparing for her role of Brunhilde in Die walküre which she is going to perform in Canada’s prestigious Edmonton Opera.
“In Sewanee, everything kind of slows down, you can take a breath, grounded in nature, and feel a sense of calm and just perform!”