William Socolof

William Socolof is an award-winning operatic bass-baritone and recitalist. He has appeared as a soloist with many leading North American orchestras, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. He was the winner of the 2020 YCA Susan Wadsworth International Auditions. The New York native graduated from The Juilliard School in the spring of 2022 with an Artist Diploma in Opera Studies and received the Stephen Novick Grant for Career Advancement. He then joined the prestigious Merola Opera Programme at San Francisco Opera, where he sang the role of Riolobo in excerpts from Daniel Catán's Florencia en el Amazonas, as well as opera scenes by Mozart and Berlioz with the San Francisco Opera Orchestra. William Socolof is a member of the Cologne Opera Studio from autumn 2023 and has appeared in, among others, Attila Kadri Şendil's The Bremen Town Musicians, Boris Blacher's Romeo and Juliet, Iván Eröd's Tosca, Pünktchen und Aton and L'incoronazione di Poppea.  2024.25 will see, among others, performances as Colline in La Bohème, the carer of Orest in Elektra, Masetto in Don Giovanni, Curio in Giulio Cesare in Egitto and Papageno in Die Zauberflöte for Young and Old.
He was a member of the Atelier Lyrique of the Verbier Festival 2023, singing the role of Father Truelove in a concert performance of The Rake's Progress with the Verbier Festival Junior Orchestra under the direction of James Gaffigan. William Socolof made his debut with the National Symphony Orchestra in Bernstein's Mass under the direction of James Gaffigan. Recent highlights also include Vaughan Williams' Sir John in Love with Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra at the Bard Music Festival, Beethoven's Choral Fantasy op. 80 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and music director Andris Nelsons, Barber's Dover Beach, Op. 3 with the Borromeo String Quartet at Carnegie Hall, and performances with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra under the auspices of the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society in collaboration with Barbara Berger's Dover Beach, Op. 3 with the Borromeo String Quartet at Carnegie Hall and performances with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra under the auspices of the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society in association with Barbara Hannigan and Richard Egarr. Opera performances included Don Alfonso in Così fan tutte at the Juilliard School in a production conducted by alumnus Nimrod David Pfeffer and directed by David Paul, and the role of Daniel Webster in Virgil Thomson's The Mother of Us All at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of Project 19, the New York Philharmonic's multi-year Philharmonic's centenary initiative, Project 19. In the summers of 2019, 2020 and 2021, he was a resident artist at the renowned Marlboro Music Festival, performing extensive works by Bach, Brahms, Mahler and Schubert with pianists Jonathan Biss, Malcolm Martineau and Mitsuko Uchida. As a Tanglewood Music Festival fellow in the summer of 2018, and under the direction of Sanford Sylvan, Dawn Upshaw and Stephanie Blythe, William Socolof performed with the Boston Pops, played Bach cantatas under the direction of John Harbison and premiered works by Michael Gandolfi and Nico Muhly in collaboration with pianist Emmanuel Ax.