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Nominated for the Dora Award for Outstanding Performance by an Individual, Sara is the 2024 winner of the Wirth Vocal Prize, a previous District Winner and Regional Encouragement Award Winner from the Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition, a three-time laureate of the Jeunes Ambassadeurs Lyriques, and a recent alumna of Barbara Hannigan's Equilibrium Young Artists. An avid interpreter of new music, she enjoys close collaborations with composers including James Rolfe, Danika Lorèn, Cecilia Livingston, and Amy Brandon.
The 2025/2026 season sees Sara in returns to the Little Opera Company of Winnipeg as Addie in Ricky Ian Gordon/Royce Vavrek’s The House Without a Christmas Tree, and debuts with the Victoria Philharmonic Choir in British Columbia, the Toronto Beach Chorale and Winnipeg’s Dead of Winter. She reprises her critically acclaimed recital in a dark blue night with the pianist Isabelle David for the Women’s Musical Club of Winnipeg. In the spring, New Focus Records will release her recording of James Rolfe’s O Greenest Branch conducted by David Fallis as well as her performance of Amy Brandon’s The Bond, a song cycle written for her with poems by Miriam Waddington. Her first opera libretto, an adaptation of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market with music by Danika Lorèn, will be workshopped by the University of Toronto Opera School in January.
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For the 2023-2024 season, Sara sang Musetta in La bohème with the Orchestre Classique de Montréal and ICAV conducted by Victorien Vanoosten and staged by Francois Racine. She gave a recital in the Canadian Opera Company’s Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre, including the Canadian premiere of Pulitzer-nominated composer Alex Weiser's in a dark blue night, debuted with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony and the Grand Philharmonic Choir as the soloist in James Whitbourn’s Annelies, and sang Eve to crticial acclaim in the Canadian premiere of Jonathan Dove’s The Walk from the Garden with the Little Opera Company of Winnipeg.
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"Sara Schabas was a delightfully coy Zerlina, singing a very sensuous 'Vedrai, carino'."
Dawn Martens, Opera Canada
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Sara recently premiered the title role in Maxime Goulet’s The Flight of the Hummingbird with Pacific Opera Victoria and Vancouver Opera, returning the following season to sing as the Dormouse in POV’s filmed production of Elizabeth Raum’s The Garden of Alice. In 2019, she worked with Vienna’s Concentus Musicus after moving to Vienna as a grant winner with the Hnatyshyn Foundation and gave a recital in the Zürich Opera House’s Spiegelsaal in 2020 with Canadian pianist Marie-Ève Scarfone. She performed as Henri in Tapestry Opera’s Dora-nominated production of Bandits in the Valley and recorded her debut album with New Focus Recordings of Amy Brandon's The Bond, with funding from the Canada Council for the Arts.
Sara began her career singing Papagena (Die Zauberflöte) with the Dayton Opera in Ohio and Juliette (Roméo et Juliette) with the Aspen Opera Theater as well as Mahler's Fourth Symphony under the baton of the late Maestro Lorin Maazel. Previous soloist engagements have included work with the Dayton Philharmonic, Oakville Chamber Symphony, the Missisauga Symphony, Thirteen Strings, the Rockford Symphony Orchestra and the Bach-Elgar Choir. Her operatic repertoire includes Susanna, Lauretta, Corinna (Il viaggio a Reims), Anne Truelove, Juliette, Pamina, Gretel, and numerous other roles. She has been a district winner at the Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition, Canada's Eckhardt-Grammaté Competition, the Jeunes Ambassadeurs Lyriques, the IRCPA's Singing Stars of Tomorrow, was recently nominated for the Dora Award for Outstanding Performance by an Individual for her performance of Anne Frank in Cecilia Livingston's Singing Only Softly. ​
David Jaeger, The Wholenote Magazine
Sara holds degrees from the University of Toronto (Hon. Voice Perf., Eng. Literature Minor) and Roosevelt University (M.Mus., Siragusa Endowed Scholarship) with additional studies at Vienna’s Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst. She is a certified yoga teacher and a founding board member of the charity Sharing Notes, which brings free musical performances to hospitals and prisons. She is currently pursuing doctoral studies at McGill University researching the Austrian-Canadian mezzo-soprano, Emmy Heim with aid from the Fonds de Recherche du Québec, and is the editor of Art Song Canada e-magazine.​​​​
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