Mary Dibbern
Accompanist and Vocal Coach

Recitals with Kurt Ollmann. Click for information

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The American pianist Mary Dibbern joins the Minnesota Opera as Head of Music starting with the 2009-1010 season. She is internationally known as a specialist in the field of vocal accompaniment. Her activities include opera coaching, recitals, recordings, master classes at the University level, Young Artists Program teaching, television and radio appearances in Europe, the United States and Asia. She is also the author of four books for Pendragon Press, with a fifth book in progress. In collaboration with the Estate of Jacques Leguerney, she is the Editorial Consultant for a new series of editions of all of the works of French composer Jacques Leguerney, published by Musik Fabrik.

Dibbern is Phi Beta Kappa/President's Honor Roll graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Piano Performance from the University of North Dakota (Grand Forks). She also studied at the University of Michigan summer school in Interlochen. She attended Southern Methodist University (Dallas) where she graduated summa cum laude with a Master of Music in accompaniment under the direction of Maestro Paul Vellucci. 

In 1978, Mary Dibbern moved to Paris to work with the great teachers, Nadia Boulanger and Pierre Bernac. She accompanied in the private studios of Bernac, Re Koster and Gérard Souzay. She was frequently an assistant to Dalton Baldwin in his master classes, and made an extensive study of vocal recital repertoire with him at the Orford Music Center (Canada), the Geneva Conservatory and the Westminster Choir College. She attended the Franz Schubert Institute in Baden-bei-Wien (Austria), where she worked with Erik Werba, Jorg Demus and Hans Hotter and received the Franz Schubert Prize for Lieder Accompaniment. In 1987 she received a grant from the Fondation Internationale Nadia and Lili Boulanger that allowed her to undertake private study of French opera style with Janine Reiss, who later chose her as assistant for productions at the Théâtre Musicale de Paris-Châtelet, at the CNIPAL (Marseille) and in Toulouse. 

Mary Dibbern, who has resided in France since 1978, works internationally as a free-lance vocal coach, accompanist and author. This season she is guest coach for the Seattle Opera, the Radio France-Montpellier Festival, the Fort Worth Opera, the Cincinnati Opera and the Hawai'i Opera Theatre. In past seasons, she has been guest coach for productions of the Opéra National de Paris and at the operas of Nice, Bordeaux, Lyons, Châtelet, the Opéra-Comique, the Opera of Toulouse, the Festival de Radio France-Montpellier, the Théâtre Municipal de Lausanne (Switzerland), the Círculo Portuense de Opera (Oporto), the Lithuanian National Opera, the Hawai’i Opera Theatre, the Seattle Opera, the Ft. Worth Opera and the Shanghai Opera House (PRC). She was in charge of musical and language preparation for the first French-language productions in China of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette and Bizet’s Carmen. 

She has worked on the musical preparation of French, Italian, German and Russian operas and recordings in close collaboration with the world’s finest conductors including Lorin Maazel, Georges Pretre, Jeffrey Tate, Dennis Russell Davies, Miguel Harth-Bedoya, Sir Alexander Gibson, Kent Nagano, Michel Plasson, Thomas Fulton and Enrique Diemecke. She has accompanied vocal recitals in the USA, Europe and Japan—notably at La Scala, the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, the Opéra-Comique, Radio France and the Opéra Royal de Versailles. She is on the Advisory Board of the Lotte Lehmann Foundation. Her recital recordings include Mélodies de Jacques Leguerney released by Claves (Switzerland), a CD produced to honor the composer’s 90th birthday celebration in Paris and which won the Grand Prix du Disque; Offenbach au Menu on the Maguelone label and Mélodies de Jacques Leguerney, Vols. I and II (LPs) for Harmonia Mundi France. After the success of her world premier recordings of Leguerney’s songs, she was chosen to edit eight volumes of the composer’s previously unpublished mélodies for Editions Max Eschig (Paris). Her most recent CD is Under Her Spell: The Viardot Effect - consecrated to Pauline Viardot and her contemporaries.

Dibbern is devoted to the teaching of young singers and pianists. She is permanent guest master class teacher for the Young Artist Programs at the Seattle Opera, the Hawaii Opera Theater, and the Ft. Worth Opera. She has also given master classes at the North Texas University, the University of Minnesota–Minneapolis, North Dakota State University Fargo, the University of Nevada Las Vegas (Artist in Residence), the University of Texas Austin, Coe College, Oregon State University Corvallis, Whitman College (Washington), Linfield College (Oregon), Southern Methodist University (Dallas) and the University of North Dakota (Grand Forks). She was guest clinician and performing artist for the National Association of Teachers of Singing 1999 Summer Workshop: French Art Song in Study and Performance at Rutgers University as well as for the following NATS chapters: Iowa Chapter, Las Vegas Chapter, San Diego Chapter, Cascade Chapter (Oregon), Puget Sound Chapter (Seattle), Georgia Chapter in collaboration with the Georgia Music Teachers Association, and the Dallas Ft. Worth Chapter. 

She is the author of The Tales of Hoffmann: Performance Guide; Carmen: Performance Guide and Faust/Roméo et Juliette: Two Performance Guides for Pendragon Press, as well as Interpreting the Songs of Jacques Leguerney: A Guide for Study and Performance in collaboration with Carol Kimball and Patrick Choukroun. Her fifth book, Manon/Werther: Two Performance Guides, will be published in 2009.