New Artist of the Month: Soprano Abigail Raiford

Abigail Raiford failed to nab top honors at the Met Opera’s Laffont Competition Finals Concert on March 16, but when she stepped on the storied stage to accept her runner-up prize (there were four, out of the nine finalists), the thundering approval that greeted her was its own kind of victory. “Standing alone on the Met stage and hearing that felt like a dream come true,” says the New York based soprano.

“Abby’s brilliance was so evident, you can hardly not call her a winner,” says Amy Burton, her teacher at the Mannes School and beyond. “It’s an indication of how many audiences are going to roar for her talent going forward.”

It was her performance of The Bell Song from Delibes’s opera Lakmé that got me. It's a difficult aria, to be sure, but any well-trained lyric soprano with good technique and a secure upper register is generally up to its challenges. What struck this listener was not just her accuracy or her comfort in a stratospheric tessitura, but the radiant beauty of her tone. From top to bottom, in sustained notes as well as the aria’s staccato “bells,” the voice remained round, full, and shimmering. This was not just a deft technician, but a major vocal talent.

Nature and nurture

The 30-year-old soprano comes from musical stock. Both of her parents are singers. Tenor Steve Raiford, a tenor, sang with New York City Opera and New York Grand Opera; soprano Judith Pannill Raiford had a significant concert career and was a mainstay of Musica Sacra’s annual Messiah. When Abby was nine, the family moved from New York to Tulsa so that Judith could join the faculty of Oral Roberts University. She is now director of the University of Tulsa’s School of Music.

Abigail Raiford’s vocation was clear to her from an early age. “I always loved singing and I always loved expressing myself,” she says. “And I always had a good ear. I’d listen to the radio and tell my parents ‘They aren’t singing on pitch.’” Her first on-stage experience was with Tulsa Youth Opera, covering the three spirits in The Magic Flute. “I had to learn all three parts, which was a lot to keep in my tiny middle-school brain,” she laughs.

Her parents, knowing the difficulty of the path for professional singers, encouraged other pursuits. (They were thrilled when she expressed an interest in geology.)  But before she completed high school, she was set on a singing career. “As soon as I made the decision, they were behind me a hundred percent,” she says.

Her mother was her first teacher. They worked together from Abigail’s senior year in high school through her years as an undergraduate at the University of Tulsa. “We always got along swimmingly,” she says. “There were definitely some lessons where I desperately needed her to be my mom as well as my teacher. My junior year in particular had a lot of personal ups and downs, and I spent maybe a few too many lessons venting my emotions in her office instead of singing.

“From the jump, I knew I was a lyric-coloratura soprano,” she continues. “I always had a high register, but the rest of the voice needed time to come in. My mom gave me a foundational technique for that.”

She returned to the city of her birth for her master’s degree, working with Burton at Mannes. “When we started, I remember thinking ‘Oh, we’re going to have such fun!’” Burton says. “Aside from her natural gifts and her intelligence and her musicality, she just loves singing. She has a discerning ear; she knows how to approach things technically and where she has to breathe. But none of that works if you don’t have the joy and the passion that Abby has.”

Ready for launch

“She was ready to launch by the time she finished Mannes,” Burton says. Raiford quickly picked up work in the young artist programs at Central City Opera and Sarasota Opera. She played Elvira in Tulsa Opera’s 2022 L’italiana in Algeri, and, following in her mother’s footsteps, sang soprano solos in the Messiah with the Handel Choir of Baltimore and Montana’s Glacier Symphony. In 2024, she appeared in Jupiter’s Journey to the Earth, Little Opera Theatre of New York’s adaptation of Haydn’s opera Philemon und Baucis.

Last summer, she covered Giulietta in I Capuleti e i Montecchi with Teatro Nuovo, and she returns to the organization in July, singing Lisa in the first cast of La sonnambula. "I knew her voice was good for it,” says Will Crutchfield, Teatro Nuovo’s artistic and general director. “What I didn't know until I saw her in action was the way she would take complete responsibility for her role. Every acting moment had intention, every vocal phrase and ornament was conceived in a way that worked for her.”

Raiford lives with computer scientist named Dominic. “He’s a support and anchor for me,” she says of her partner. “He has helped me decide what I want my life to look like.” She plans to continue mixing opera and concert appearances, but she nurses a secret ambition. “I’m a big video-game fan,” she says. “It’d be surreal to hear my voice on the soundtrack of a Fire Emblem game.”

_{Top photo by Rafael Clemente; bottom by Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera}