Meet Our Managing Director: Francesca Aguado Benner

Francesca Aguado Benner is proud to lead Cadence, Central PA's Treble Chorus, with analytical prowess and an absolute love of music. She is responsible for maintaining the daily administrative management of the chorus.

Francesca has been in leading administration roles for several classical vocal programs abroad, including the Mediterranean Opera Studio (overseeing its transition from a technically-based program to its first year of fully staged operas with orchestra) Bel Canto in Tuscany, the Vienna Summer Music Festival, the London Summer Music Theatre Academy, and the Austria Summer Music Festival. Francesca has maintained music studios at the collegiate level for almost two decades, as well as a robust private voice studio. Her students have been accepted at some of the most prestigious music schools in the

country, including the Juilliard School of Music, Westminster Choir College, Northwestern University and Eastman School of Music.

Currently, Francesca is a Senior Lecturer in the Visual and Performing Arts Department at Mount Saint Mary’s University and a PhD candidate in the Art Administration Department at the University of Kentucky.

Having earned praise from The Washington Post for her voice’s confident precision and articulation, and by South Florida Classical Review for her vocal delivery’s “immediacy and intensity,” and a “dark and opulent tone” soprano, Francesca Aguado has made a seamless transition from mezzo soprano repertoire to soprano in the past few seasons. She has worked with the Maryland Symphony Orchestra, Frederick Symphony Orchestra, Bel Cantanti Opera Company, Opera D’Oro, Gulf Coast Symphony and Miami Lyric Opera.

Some credits include: Mimi (La Bohême); Lucia (Lucia di Lammermoor), Donna Elvira (Don Giovanni); Rosina (Il barbiere di Siviglia); Musetta (La Bohême), Mother (Amahl and the Night Visitors); Ma Joad (suite version of The Grapes of Wrath, accompanied by composer Ricky Ian Gordon); Dorabella (Cosi fan tutte); Dinah (Trouble in Tahiti); Maurya (Riders to the Sea); Zweite Dame (Die Zauberflöte).