Elizabeth McCune (née Ford),[2][3] known professionally as Elizabeth Zharoff, is an American YouTuber, video game sound designer, and opera singer. After largely putting her operatic career on hold, she devoted herself to the topics of voice and singing on her YouTube channel, "The Charismatic Voice". She works primarily as a voice coach and singer and arranger of video game soundtracks. She also interviews rock vocalists. Her YouTube channel, as of June 2024[update], has over 402million views and over 1.84million subscribers.
Zharoff is married and lives in Tucson, Arizona[3] with her husband, Kirk McCune, and their son, Mycroft. On 2nd November 2024, Zharoff announced in a video on her YouTube channel that she was expecting her second son with McCune.
Career
Opera
After initial engagements at the Opera Philadelphia, Zharoff was a member of the Young Ensemble of the DresdenSemperoper in the 2012/13 season, where she sang Pamina in Mozart's 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.[6]
Ingrid Gerk praised a performance by Zharoff in an otherwise disappointing production of La traviata at the English National Opera in 2015:
Elizabeth Zharoff was the most convincing. Even if the voice in the forte sounded rather harsh, the height was occasionally a nuance too low and a superficially (visible and) audible vibrato somewhat diminished the overall impression in the close-up, over the course of the performance she showed stamina and concentration and was touching her beautiful soulful piano passages."[7]
She said of her own performance of Violetta in La Traviata:
This production is tough because there's no intermission. Vocally I don't know if it's that big a difference for me, but emotionally and keeping focus – that's difficult. Being willing to be vulnerable for that long makes Violetta a lot more personal to me. It's almost depressing to be in her state. I'm not the kind of singer who acts from the outside; I do my best to put myself in her position and draw on my own life experiences to make it real. By the end I'm all done and I say ‘Jeez, I'm glad she's dead so I can leave all that behind‘.[8]
YouTube
In August 2014, Zharoff launched her own YouTube channel, "The Charismatic Voice", under 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.[9] 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
She also 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.[10]
Vocal coaching and research
Zharoff offers online courses as a voice coach. She has also developed an interest in sound creation in 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 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.[11] Within a month of its launch, the campaign had surpassed its goal of USD$235,000.[12]
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
^ abBalfour, Andrew. "130: Elizabeth Zharoff - Scaling Up Online". Surviving Classical Music. Archived from the original on 26 November 2022. Retrieved 3 March 2023. Note: This was a podcast which as of April 2023 was no longer accessible.
