About Gigi Mitchell-Velasco

Conductor Gigi Mitchell-Velasco showed an aptitude for music at an early age and had a passionate desire to learn many different instruments. She studied the organ as soon as her feet could reach the pedals and was a self-taught pianist with an unusual talent for fluency and sightreading, starting to accompany instrumentalists and singers who were well beyond her young age. She also played violin and guitar in her early years. Auditions for music schools garnered her a place at both the Juilliard School and the Curtis Institute of Music; she chose the latter, graduating with a degree in flute. During her time at Curtis, she was accepted at the Opera Department after only five months of voice studies, and was offered a double major to include voice and opera. She turned it down to be with her husband, tenor Noel Velasco, who had been her first voice teacher. She served as principal flute with the Opera Company of Boston under Sarah Caldwell for 8 seasons, and during this time played with other freelance orchestras and bands, including as piccolo soloist with Keith Brion's New Sousa Band US touring group, Boston Philharmonic, Rhode Island Philharmonic and Vermont Symphony. Her singing career began with an invitation to sing in an Opera New England production of the Magic Flute. Her career fast forwarded and in only two years she found herself at Santa Fe Opera as an apprentice artist, and not too long after that with several contracts for exclusive management, eventually settling with the Colbert Artist Management which was a then small boutique agency managing singers such as her mentor Christa Ludwig, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Joan Sutherland, Nathalie Stutzmann, Matthias Goerne and the like. Gigi’s international, award-winning singing career spanned over a 20 year period and added some wonderful conductors to her list with which she collaborated.  The Curtis Institute had already given her the experience of playing with conductors such as Eugene Ormandy, Zubin Mehta, Andre Previn, Aldo Ceccato, and Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos and to this list she added some regular collaborators such as Jaap van Zweden, Hans Graf, Andreas Delfs, Jahja Ling, Joseph Rescigno, as well as several guestings with Dmitri Kitajenko, Helmut Rilling, Michael Tilson Thomas, Eiji Oue and many others.
Other conducting mentors besides these wonderful maestros that she had the pleasure to perform with and learn from have been Paul Vermel, David Hayes and Markand Thakar.