Joan Marie Dauber is very grateful to be a part of Chicago Vocal Art Consortium’s production of Handel’s Alcina. Her love of Baroque music began with four years of singing in Bach Festivals at Baldwin-Wallace Conservatory of Music (Berea, OH). As a concert soloist, she has sung several large works, including Bach’s Mattäuspassion (Baroque Artists of Champaign-Urbana), Vivaldi’s Gloria, Schubert’s Mass in G Major, Mozart’s Coronation Mass, Rutter’s Mass of the Children (with Ravenswood Community Orchestra at St. Benedict Parish). Joan Marie has also presented Baroque arias and solo cantatas in concerts and recitals in New York, Champaign-Urbana, and Chicago, and sang with the chorus of the Baroque Artists of Champaign-Urbana for three years.
As a soloist Joan Marie is also an actively sought-after interpreter of contemporary classical music, particularly American music of the last century. She has been an invited guest artist at new music festivals and concerts at Mercer University, SUNY-Potsdam, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, Argonne National Laboratory, and Syracuse University. In Chicago Joan Marie was a founding member of the MAVerick Ensemble, devoted to presentations of contemporary music, art and video pieces by modern composers. She has performed solo and chamber works by George Crumb, Morton Feldman, John Cage, Christian Wolff, Erik Lund, Daniel Crozier, Sever Tipei, W.J. Raynovich, Ellen Mandel, André Previn, Jake Heggie, Richard Hundley, Juliana Hall, Ernst Bacon, William Bolcom, Bernard Herrmann, Rosśa Crean, Luigi Dallapiccolla, and more. She sang on the professional recording of local composer Rosśa Crean’s new opera The Great God Pan, under the PARMA Recordings/Navona Records label.
In Chicago she has championed new music at venues such as the HotHouse, the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, the Gene Siskel Film Center, the Renaissance Society, and Lyriq Music School. In 2016-2017 Joan Marie and her longtime collaborator Sandro Tsomaia presented a three-part concert series “Infinite Affection: Aaron Copland & Emily Dickinson in Song,” which brought Chicago audiences music from Copland, his contemporaries, and modern composers’ settings of Dickinson poetry, with encore presentations at Harold Washington Library and at PianoForte Chicago. You can also find Joan Marie credited for her research on Copland in the book “Copland Connotations: Interviews and Studies” edited by P. Dickinson, and for her research on John Cage in “The Cambridge Companion to New Music” edited by D. Nicholls.
Joan Marie has been recognized as a finalist and semifinalist for the past several years by The American Prize in Voice Performance for opera, art song and oratorio. Previously, she was a semifinalist for the Harold Haugh Light Opera Vocal Competition and a finalist for the Civic Morning Musical Competition.
Joan Marie lives in Chicago with her husband and their three cats. She is head of the Voice Department at Lyriq Music School in North Center and is an active volunteer at PAWS Chicago, the Midwest’s largest no kill animal shelter, where she trains humans and dogs alike.