Elizabeth Zharoff

Elizabeth McCune (née Ford; born March 19, 1986), While still a student at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Zharoff took part in several prestigious music competitions and made her debut as a soloist at Carnegie Hall in 2009. In the same year she reached the semi-finals of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and, two years later, reached the final of the Queen Elisabeth Competition. In 2012 she completed a master's degree in opera singing from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

Career Opera After initial engagements at the Opera Philadelphia, Zharoff was a member of the Young Ensemble of the Dresden Semperoper in the 2012/13 season, where she sang Pamina in Mozart's The Magic Flute and Violetta in Verdi's La traviata. In addition to embodying other soprano roles at various opera houses, she appeared on the concert stage with the Cleveland Orchestra and performed a chamber piece composed for her by Richard Danielpour. In the 2013/14 season she made her debut as Giunia in Lucio Silla at the Opéra National de Bordeaux.

Ingrid Gerk praised Zharoff's performance in an otherwise disappointing production of La traviata at the English National Opera in 2015:

She said of her performance of Violetta in La traviata:

YouTube In August 2014, Zharoff launched her own YouTube channel, "The Charismatic Voice," with the motto "Demystifying singing," in which she addresses many facets of the human voice and singing via reaction videos. After the number of subscribers grew sharply during the first year of the COVID pandemic, she hired an assistant in the summer of 2020. In her reaction videos, she analyzes and comments on different vocal aspects. At the suggestion of her subscribers, she began to devote her analysis to rock and metal singers, whom she had never heard, such as Ronnie James Dio and Rob Halford and, increasingly, to extreme, guttural vocals, featuring subgenres such as deathcore. In January 2021, she also began to conduct long-distance video "tea-time interviews" with well-known singers. Early guests included Alissa White-Gluz, James LaBrie, Will Ramos, and Devin Townsend.

Video games Zharoff arranges vocal parts for video games of various genres, including the real-time strategy game 0 AD and the point-and-click adventure game Elsinore, released in 2019 and which was nominated for "Best Original Choral Composition," "Best Original Song" with "Fair as a Rose," and "Best Original Soundtrack Album" at the 18th Annual Game Audio Network Guild Awards.

Zharoff performs as Annette in the role-playing musical game People of Note.

Vocal coaching and research Zharoff offers online courses as a voice coach. She has also developed an interest in sound creation within the upper laryngeal structure. She used a Kickstarter campaign in September 2024 to create The Charismatic Voice Research Fund, which will allow university studies of this largely not-widely-understood function, using professional singers as test subjects. The best known of these subjects is Will Ramos. The campaign was promoted through her YouTube channel and a feature interview with CanvasRebel Magazine. Within a month of its launch, the campaign had surpassed its goal of USD$235,000.

Personal life Zharoff is married and lives in Tucson, Arizona with her husband, Kirk McCune, and their sons. The couple's second son was born on April 19, 2025.

Opera repertoire Samuel Barber: Antony and Cleopatra – Cleopatra Vincenzo Bellini: La sonnambula – Amina Charles Gounod: Faust – Marguerite Leoš Janáček: The sly little vixen – Sly little vixen Claudio Monteverdi: L'incoronazione di Poppea – Drusilla Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: The Abduction from the Seraglio – Konstanze Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: The Magic Flute – Pamina Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Lucio Silla – Giunia Igor Stravinsky: The Rake's Progress – Anne Trulove Giuseppe Verdi: La traviata – Violetta Kurt Weill: Street Scene – Anna Maurrant

Ludography Original soundtracks 2017: Aven Colony 2018: Where the Water Tastes Like Wine 2018: Yoku's Island Express 2018: 0 AD 2019: Devolver Digital Cinematic Universe: Phase 1 Original Soundtrack 2019: Elsinore 2020: Lost Words: Beyond the Page 2021: Ambition: A Minuet in Power

Compilations 2016: Successor: Final Fantasy VIII Remixed 2016: Mobius: Sonic the Hedgehog Remixed 2016: Pattern: An Homage to Everybody's Gone to the Rapture 2016: Enraptured: BioShock Remixed 2016: Fallen: An Undertale Tribute 2016: Song Cycle: The History of Video Games 2017: Zodiac: Final Fantasy Tactics Remixed 2017: Tesseract: An Acoustic FEZ Album 2017: Spira: Music from Final Fantasy X (Besaid Mix) 2018: Fate: A Tribute to Majora's Mask 2019: Exile: A Tribute to Supergiant Games 2019: Resurrection of the Night: Alucard's Elegy 2019: Epoch: A Tribute to Chrono Trigger 2020: Flamesgrace: A Tribute to Octopath Traveler