Singers
The Singers
Heidi Moss Erickson
Heidi Moss Erickson received a dual biology and voice degree at Oberlin College, where she worked in the voice lab of Richard Miller. Her more than 20 year performing career spans both opera and concert repertoire, with a focus on new music. She has won prizes in many prestigious singing competitions including the Metropolitan Opera, The MacAllister Awards, and the Liederkranz Foundation. Heidi relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area from NYC in 2003 and has been a featured performer with area companies including West Edge Opera, Ensemble Parallele, Festival Opera, Pocket Opera, Livermore Opera, Fremont Symphony, Oakland Symphony, Sacramento Choral Society, West Bay Opera, and the San Francisco Lyric Opera.
She received her graduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania in biochemistry, with an emphasis in neuroscience. Her postgraduate research on telomeres at Rockefeller University led to prestigious publications, including a landmark paper in Cell which demonstrated that the ends of DNA are looped.
In 2007 she came down with a rare CNVII nerve injury which resurrected her passion for how the brain controls the voice. Her courses and lectures have been featured both nationally and internationally at conferences and universities. Her many published writings link neuroscience with vocal pedagogy and she uses these ideas in vocal rehabilitation. She taught the vocal performance continuing education classes at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for over 10 years and has a passion for working with avocational singers.
Gail Simpson –
Gail Simpson is a versatile singing actress. Her family needed her to sing the tenor line in their family barbershop quartet on long car trips. After mostly singing in church and college choirs, she began voice training while studying economics in graduate school. Once labeled “perfect” by the SF Chronicle, her earliest performances included critically-acclaimed cabaret shows and musical reviews, including a smash hit at the Edinburg Fringe Festival. She eventually discovered the demanding discipline and sublime joys of opera which soon became her passion.
In addition to creating roles for Opera Frontier, Gail has loved being — among others — Diana Devereaux (Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing conducted by Michael Morgan), Cunegonde (Bernstein’s Candide), the Mother (Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors) and Magnolia (Kern’s Showboat).
Mark P. Robinson
Mark P. Robinson is an actor and singer who has appeared in more than three dozen theatrical, film, and commercial productions in recent years. In 2023 he created the role of troubled World War I veteran Jonathan Wharton in the world premiere of Before the Sword at New Conservatory Theatre Center in San Francisco. He stars as the villainous industrialist Konrad Beissen in the independent feature film Werewolf Serenade premiered in 2024 and will soon be available on Amazon Prime. He has a longtime side-hustle as a jazz crooner in the San Francisco Bay Area. Before taking up acting in 2018, Robinson was an award-winning magazine journalist, editor, and writer.
Street Muse
A film by Opera Frontier