Reviews and Press Photos
Luigi Nono's Intollerenza with American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall
....Musically the malicious ex-lover and then torturer, Hai-Ting Chinn was far and away musically the most faithful to the Nono credo. In every score I have read of his, each note has the most intricate directions. Ms. Chinn shaped every single note into diminuendos, into mini-crescendos. Whether at the top or bottom of the mezzo scale, she never simply sung, she made each note a story. I was stunned not so much by her voice, as her subtlety, her dramatic power within the whirlwind of the opera itself.
Harry Rolnick for ConcertoNet
Reviews of Philip Glass & Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach
Hai-Ting Chinn sang the "Bed" scene solo with beauty and clarity.
Feast of Music
Hai-Ting Chinn performed her Act Four, Scene Two solo with a supernatural edge.
Jane Rosenberg for The International Review of Music
Wonderful singing, too, from Hai-Ting Chinn in the Bed scene.
Michael Shmith for the Sydney Morning Herald
Excellent memory, true pitch and amazing dexterity in articulation in hair-raisingly fast passages were all on display.
There was also warmth and beauty of tone, notably in the solo sung by soprano Hai-Ting Chinn.
Heather Levinston for Performing Arts Hub Australia
The singers at BAM (all of them, and especially Hai-Ting Chinn, Lisa Bielawa, and Philip Anderson) were astounding.
Marina Harss for DanceTabs
...There are two bona fide showstopper arias--a free jazz tenor sax solo by Andrew Sterman
that erupts in paroxysms of sound during Act IV's "Building" scene,
and Hai-Ting Chinn's chilling, slightly dissonant vocalise to accompany "Bed".
Jake Cohen for COS
Reviews of Philip Glass La Belle et la Bete
Mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn was especially fine as Belle, singing with bright tone and tender phrasing...
Joshua Kosman for The San Francisco Chronicle
Reviews of The Wooster Group's La Didone
With the Wooster Group at the Edinburgh International Festival.
The Guardian, August 2007
La Didone in Rotterdam, with Judson Williams, John Young, and Scott Shepherd.
at St. Ann's Warehouse
"La Didone" is performed intact and quite beautifully, with the mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn in the title role...the lush-voiced Ms. Chinn will suddenly switch from an aria about the torments of passion to the parenthetical (and monotonal) delivery of a line about having seen a horrible space monster, and then back to florid song.
Ben Brantley for The New York Times
Chinn has it all: breathtaking beauty, poise, comic timing and a voice of pure gold.
David Cote for Timeout New York
Queen Dido [was] impersonated and sung by Hai-Ting Chinn, who has a lovely clear sexy soprano
Opera Today
...in Hai-Ting Chinn, the Wooster Group has a truly superb Dido, a crack Baroque interpreter who combines delicacy of diction and phrasing with incisive acting. Indeed, she manages to be fiercely stylized and sincerely affecting all at once. Plus, she looks damn good in -- and out of -- costumer Antonia Belt's wittily futuristic silver bodysuit.
TheaterMania
at the Edinburgh Festival
...a series of superb vocal and dramatic performances, notably from the glorious, poised and poignant Hai-Ting Chinn as Dido.
The Scotsman
Chinn has a voice like silvery, fluid mercury.
The Independent, UK
The ensemble cast led by Hai-Ting Chinn's beautiful Dido, lost and trying to get her bearings in the scary new world of love, play it absolutely straight. The result is often unexpectedly moving and wistful - as if shadows and ghosts stalked the stage alongside the alien life forms. I've seen Wooster Group pieces that are far more radical, but few as tender.
The Guardian, London
...we properly get to meet the production's undoubted star as Hai-Ting Chinn becomes Dido. Her glorious, soaring voice commands attention whatever planetary mayhem is happening around her.
Onstage Scotland
Onstage in a theatre in Rotterdam, a gorgeous Oriental diva with a Louise Brooks bob is dressed in a classic silver space suit of Cold War, pre-space-race vintage...
The Herald, Glasgow
Reviews of OperaOmnia's Coronation of Poppea at Le Poisson Rouge, NYC
Vocally, the company's firepower was in the two main mezzo-soprano roles. Hai-Ting Chinn, as Poppea, created her character by indirection: you know that Poppea is a power-hungry harridan, but presumably her self-image is otherwise, and that's what Ms. Chinn portrayed, giving Poppea's vocal lines a seductively velvety tone and making even her cajoling of Emperor Nero seem sincere.
Allan Kozinn for the New York times, August 2008
The fine Poppea of Hai-Ting Chinn was attractively sung and played with a refreshing naturalness. Her manipulative handling of Nero was perfectly revealed without the underlining most performers indulge in. Cherry Duke played Nero's (troubled) masculinity with conviction and, like Chinn, did not overact Nero's unpleasant traits; she let the actions, words and music speak for themselves. In their musical assurance and beautifully understated acting they were the finest Nero and Poppea I have encountered in the theatre.
Mark Ringer for ClassicsToday.com