The Department of Music Welcomes Two New Performance Program Directors

Liza Malamut has a passion for bringing untold stories and universal themes to life through historical performance.  

A trombonist, researcher, and educator throughout the United States and abroad, Liza has performed with premier period-instrument ensembles throughout North America and beyond. She is Artistic Director of The Newberry Consort, a Chicago-based organization that creates accessible and historically informed performances of medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music; and a founding member of Incantare, an ensemble of violins and sackbuts formed to highlight music of lesser-known and marginalized composers and their contemporaries in early modern Europe. Her playing can be heard on the Musica Omnia, Naxos, Hyperion, New Focus Recordings, and George Blood Audio labels. She has performed at international venues all over the world, including Carnegie Hall, Washington National Cathedral, the BAM Center, Warsaw Philharmonic Hall, and the Chiesa di San Rocco. 

A passionate teacher and researcher, Liza has presented masterclasses, lecture recitals, and papers at conferences and institutions throughout the country. She has been a frequent guest instructor and ensemble coach at early music festivals and workshops, including Amherst Early Music Festival, Madison Early Music Festival, Whitewater Early Music Festival, and many others. Her academic work was supported by an American Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the American Association of University Women, and she is a co-editor and contributor for the book Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy: New Perspectives with Rebecca Cypess and Lynette Bowring (Indiana University Press). Her most recent article, “Europa Rossi: A Question of Identity,” appears in the peer-reviewed, open-access journal  Min-Ad: Israel Studies in Musicology.  

Liza holds a Bachelor of Music degree in Trombone Performance from Eastman School of Music, where she studied trombone with John Marcellus, and a Master of Music degree from Boston University, where she studied with Don Lucas. She earned her Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Historical Performance from Boston University, where she studied with Greg Ingles. Her dissertation, a method book for modern trombonists, integrates historical techniques with mainstream playing and introduces eighty-eight solo etudes for trombone transcribed from historical sources. She currently teaches historical trombone at Indiana University and is thrilled to assume the directorship of the University of Chicago Early Music Ensemble in fall 2025. 

Soprano Elisabeth Marshall has been praised for her “admirably flexible, gilt-edged voice” of “resonance and beauty” and “radiant sheen,” particularly in the works of Bach, Handel, Haydn, and Mozart. A 2016 finalist in The American Prize Friedrich and Victoria Schorr Award, she was awarded their Special Citation for “Outstanding Performance in Music before 1800”, and in 2017 won the Third Prize in Art Song and Oratorio.

In 2015 Ms. Marshall made her Chicago Symphony Center debut in Handel’s Messiah (Apollo Chorus), which she has also sung with the Cincinnati Symphony, at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel in Chicago, and in Hailsham, England. Ms. Marshall has performed the music of J.S. Bach extensively, including his B minor Mass with the Chorus pro Musica of Boston, Maine Music Society, the Choral Art Society of Maine; Mattäuspassion at the Oregon Bach Festival under Helmuth Rilling, and numerous cantatas with the White Mountain Bach Festival in North Conway, New Hampshire and others. She is often in demand as the soprano soloist in Mozart’s Mass in C minor, which she has sung with several ensembles across the Eastern United States. Other notable engagements include Mozart's Requiem (Rochester Cathedral, England); Carmina Burana in Portland, Maine; and Beethoven’s Choral Fantasia with the Indianapolis Symphony under CBE Raymond Leppard.

On the opera stage she was praised for her “precision” and “technical skill” as the Queen of the Night (The Magic Flute) in London with the Merry Opera Company; has appeared as Frasquita (Carmen) with Bay Chamber Concerts at Maine's historic Camden Opera House; Rosalinde (Die Fledermaus), and Rosabella (The Most Happy Fella) under Constantine Kitsopoulos with IU Opera Theater; Elisetta (Il matrimonio segreto) at the HMT-Leipzig; and Lauretta in Bizet’s Dr. Miracle with OperaMaine.

A dedicated advocate of new music, Ms. Marshall is a regular artist with the Brooklyn Art Song Society and is featured on their 2015 debut studio album New Voices (Roven Records) in James Kallembach’s Four Romantic Songs, her delivery of which OPERA NEWS hailed as “radiant” and “sensuous.” In 2016 she joined the Lorelei Ensemble in the U.S. premiere of George Benjamin’s Dream of the Song at the Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival under the baton of Stefan Asbury and returned with them in 2017 for György Ligeti's Clocks and Clouds. In the summer of 2017, she also was a Professional Fellow at SongFest in Los Angeles, performing works of Libby Larsen and Scott Wheeler, among others.

Ms. Marshall performs with several professional choral ensembles including the Handel & Haydn Society and The Thirteen, and previously with the Oregon Bach Festival, Lorelei Ensemble, Wexford Festival Opera, London Philharmonia Chorus, and Carmel Bach Festival, working with conductors such as Harry Christophers, Lars Ulrik Mortensen, Helmuth Rilling, Matthew Halls, Masaaki Suzuki, and Leonard Slatkin.

A Fulbright grant recipient to the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Leipzig, Germany, she sang for many years with Helmuth Rilling through the Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart, and later La Academia de Bach in Chile. Ms. Marshall holds a Doctorate in Music from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where her principal teacher was Carol Vaness, and has also coached with Roger Vignoles, Martin Katz, Håkan Hagagård, Delores Ziegler, Charles Riecker, and Suzanne Murphy.

Ms. Marshall is Director of Vocal Studies at the University of Chicago, teaches voice lessons and diction at Elmhurst University, and also works as a freelance writer for the Classical Singer magazine. She has previously served on the voice faculties of the Ithaca College School of Music, and the University of Southern Maine Osher School of Music.