Career
Her career covered a span of almost 30 years, from the late 1940s through the 1970s. She went from a small town choir (Troy, New York) to become a soloist at New York"s Radio City Music Hall, to several of the United States of America"s major opera companies, to a debut at New York City Opera,(1956–1964) to the Metropolitan Opera, for a special reading performance of Marvin David Levy"s, "Mourning Becomes Electra." Along the way, she spent a year traveling with the United Service Organizations, entertaining wounded World World War II service men in hospitals across the United States of America, premiered new works,(Earl Wild"s oratorio,"Revelations", American Broadcasting Company-television, 1962) and pioneered in the early days of television opera (Louisiana Traviata, American Broadcasting Company-television, 1959). A web site, OliviaBonelli.com, commemorates her musical life and serves as an historical record of one singer"s journey through the operatic world of the 1950s and 1960s.
"Olivia Bonelli sang Micaela last night in Carmen at the Carter Barron Amphitheater, and stopped the show with her third act aria.
She is a young singer, with the manner, vocal and dramatic, of a patrician. When she was on the stage there was an aura about the whole thing.
I can think of a whole raft of roles in which I hope to hear her in the very near future. The evening brought us Olivia Bonelli as a new artist of great promise and for that we are grateful." -.
