Malina Rauschenfels is a soprano, composer and multi-instrumentalist transplanted to Cleveland after 11 years in New York City. Praised by the New York Times for her “compelling” performances and as “remarkable” by the Village Voice, she has also been commended by clevelandclassical.com for her “exceptional vocal range, strong acting abilities, gripping theatricality, and commanding gestures, both musical and physical.” Malina is co-founder and executive director of Burning River Baroque, with whom she sings and plays baroque cello. She is also artistic director of hūmAnómali, a collaboratively structured music ensemble which incorporates “extra-musical affairs,” such as dance, gesture and theatricality into its historically informed performances of music from antiquity to the present.

Equally comfortable with early music and contemporary music, she has performed with Quire Cleveland, Contrapunctus, Marble Sanctuary Choir, North Carolina Baroque Orchestra, Nuove Musiche, Toby Twining Music, Trinity Chamber Singers, Trinity Cathedral Choir, Alarm Will Sound and C4 – the Choral Composer Conductor Collective. She attended the Eastman School of Music and the Juilliard School for her BM and MM in cello performance and composition.

Malina has appeared in broadcast performances on WCLV Cleveland and can be heard recorded on “Musica Celestial” with the Newberry Consort, “Caritas et Amor” with Marble Sanctuary Choir and “Madrigalian Motets from Jacobean England” and “Carols for Quire from the Old & New Worlds Volume 3” with Quire Cleveland. Addionally, her group has a live CD/DVD available from their NYC concert in 2014. As a cellist, she played Davidovsky’s Divertimento for Cello and Orchestra with the Juilliard Orchestra under Reinbert de Leeuw and played a solo recital in Carneigie’s Weill Hall. She has performed in Canada, France, Italy, Serbia, Montenegro, and across the United States. Last year’s engagements included performances in “Celestial Sirens” with The Newberry Consort, concerts on the SoHIP early music series in Boston with Burning River Baroque, Cavalli’s opera ‘Apollo e Dafne’ with Venice Opera Project, and a recital with organ in Venice, Italy. This summer includes three BEMF fringe programs, Cavalli opera ‘Il Giasone,’ Three Bridges Festival with Emma Kirkby, an opera written for her by Rachel Devorah Trapp to be performed in Halifax Canada through Opera from Scratch, and ‘Acis and Galatea’ with El Fuego in Chapel Hill, NC.