Liora Grodnikaite, Elizabeth DeShong, and Alyson Cambridge Conservatory Singers Win Top Honors At Opera Columbus Vocal Competition by Charity Johnson ’99
			Three Conservatory singers won awards in Opera Columbus’s 2002 Irma M. Cooper Voice Competition, held in Columbus on March 2 and 3. Liora Grodnikaite, a senior from Vilnius, Lithuania, won first prize in the junior division, and the prize for diction, singing arias from Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Delila and Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri. Alyson Cambridge, a fifth-year double degree student from Arlington, Virginia, won third place in the junior division, with arias by Mozart and Gian Carlo Menotti. Junior Elizabeth DeShong from Fayetteville, Pennsylvania received an honorable mention in the junior division. Grodnikaite studies with Wheeler Professor of Singing Richard Miller; Cambridge and DeShong study with Professor of Singing Daune Mahy. Since its inception in 1983, the competition has included singers ages 19 to 35 years old, competing in junior and senior age divisions for a total of over $7,000 in prizes and scholarships each year. Judges for the semi-finals and finals are selected from established singers, directors, managers, administrators, and conductors across the nation.
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