Korean American pianist Laura Poe is a highly sought-after artist and collaborator who enjoys a career as a pianist, opera coach and educator. Based in Düsseldorf, Germany, Laura is a member of the ensemble at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein.

This 2024-2025 season, Laura will join the music staff of the Lyric Opera of Chicago for Missy Mazzoli’s The Listeners in addition to returning to the Metropolitan Opera for John Adams’s Antony & Cleopatra. She has also worked as a répétiteur and vocal coach at San Francisco Opera, De Nationale Opera in Amsterdam, Gran Teatre del Liceu, The Metropolitan Opera and the Semperoper Dresden, where she made her professional conducting debut conducting 19 performances of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. The production was later invited to the Lucerne Music Festival for additional performances. Laura was also an Associate Vocal Coach at The Juilliard School, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Music Academy of the West, Aspen Music Festival and School, AIMS in Graz and Si parla, si canta in Urbania, Italy.

A graduate of The Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, Laura has trained under the tutelage of world-class musicians, conductors and directors, including: Sir Thomas Allen, Marco Armiliato, Reri Grist, Thomas Hampson, James Levine, Malcolm Martineau, Ken Noda, Felicity Palmer, Renata Scotto, Diane Soviero, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Benita Valente, José van Dam and Stephen Wadsworth. 

Laura has collaborated with some of today's greatest singers, including sopranos Lisette Oropesa and Deborah Voigt, the latter with whom she performed a live broadcast on New York's classical radio station, WQXR. She was also featured in the BBC2 documentary What Makes a Great Soprano with Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. In 2009, she was a third prize winner at the Wigmore Hall International Song Competition in London. 

As an experienced violinist, flutist and horn player, Laura is a frequent performer with instrumentalists and singers. She is an official accompanist to several instrumental and vocal competitions, and is also an experienced soloist and chamber musician. She has been heard in concert at numerous festivals throughout the United States including the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Music Academy of the West, Ravinia Steans Institute, Bard Summerscape, Glimmerglass Opera, in New York's Alice Tully Hall, Museum of Modern Art, Europe and Trinidad and Tobago. 

Laura works closely with the composer John Adams as both a pianist and an arranger/editor of the piano-vocal arrangements of his recent operas. She assisted him on recent projects with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest and at the Gran Teatre del Liceu. As an arranger, she created the piano-vocal score of Adams’s Antony and Cleopatra.

Laura’s academic accomplishments include a Graduate Diploma in Collaborative Piano from The Juilliard School in New York City and a Masters in Accompanying and Chamber Music from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she was awarded in 2015, the first ever Distinguished Alumni Award in Performance. A dedicated teacher, Laura holds a Bachelors degree in Instrumental Music Education from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. 

A running enthusiast, Laura loves to travel, get lost, and race in marathons.  

Featured Projects

Antony & Cleopatra
Gran Teatre de Liceu


The Death of Klinghoffer
Radio Filharmonisch Orkest


Die Frau ohne Schatten
San Francisco Opera


Dido and Aeneas
Semperoper Dresden


Tristan und Isolde
Deutsche Oper am Rhein


The Death of Klinghoffer
The Metropolitan Opera


Girls of the Golden West
De Nationale Opera


What Makes a Great Soprano?
BBC Two



Photos


Selected Operatic Repertoire


John Adams Antony & Cleopatra The Death of Klinghoffer Girls of the Golden West Bela Bartók Bluebeard’s Castle Ludwig van Beethoven Fidelio Vincenzo Bellini Norma Alban Berg Wozzeck Leonard Bernstein Trouble in Tahiti Benjamin Britten Billy Budd A Midsummer Night’s Dream Peter Grimes The Turn of the Screw Francesco Cilea Adriana Lecouvrer César Cui Der Gestiefelte Kater Claude Debussy La chute de la maison Usher Gaetano Donizetti Anna Bolena Don Pasquale L’elisir d’amore Lucia di Lammermoor Maria Stuarda Gordon Getty Usher House Umberto Giordano Andrea Chénier Karl Amadeus Hartmann Simplicius Simplicissimus Engelbert Humperdinck Hänsel und Gretel Leoš Janáček Káťa Kabanová Věc Makropulos Oliver Knussen Where the Wild Things Are Erich Korngold Die tote Stadt Mizzy Mazzoli The Listeners Gian Carlo Menotti The Consul Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Così fan tutte Die Entführung aus dem Serail Die Zauberflöte Don Giovanni La clemenza di Tito Le nozze di Figaro Giacomo Puccini Il trittico (Il tabarro, Suor Angelica, Gianni Schicchi) La bohème Madama Butterfly Tosca Turandot Henry Purcell Dido and Aeneas Gioachino Rossini Cenerentola Il barbiere di Siviglia Dmitri Shostakovich Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk Igor Stravinsky Le Rossignol The Rake’s Progress Richard Strauss Arabella Ariadne auf Naxos Der Rosenkavalier Die Frau ohne Schatten Salome Conrad Susa Transformations Viktor Ullmann Der Kaiser von Atlantis Giuseppe Verdi Aida Un ballo in maschera Don Carlo Falstaff La traviata Nabucco Otello Rigoletto Richard Wagner Der fliegende Holländer Lohengrin Das Rheingold — Die Walküre — Siegfried Tristan und Isolde Kurt Weill Street Scene Alexander von Zemlinsky Eine Florentinishe Tragödie Der Kreidekreis

Bonus Features

 
Laura End_Medium.jpg

Marathon Times

  • Düsseldorf Marathon (2013) 5:12

  • Helsinki Marathon (2014) 5:08:48

  • Paris Marathon (2015) 5:01:22

  • Berlin Marathon (2015) 4:48:52

 

Photography

I love taking pictures of doors while I am traveling. Here is my most recent collage of doors from Strasbourg, France.

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