Sydney Kucine, Casco Bay High School class of 2013, learned how to read music before learning how to read books. Her kindergarten teacher noticed Kucine’s voice while singing nursery rhymes and suggested to Kucine’s mother that Kucine may enjoy singing in a choir.

“I went in and auditioned for this choir when I was six,” Kucine said. The instructor, Jaye Churchill, said afterward that she wanted Kucine to be in her voice studio. “It was an honor to be invited to do that when I was just auditioning for choir. I was very young. Probably the youngest that you could be.”

That was the beginning of an extraordinary life in music that would, decades later, see Kucine performing opera in Greece, Italy, Germany, and across the United States, singing at Carnegie Hall in New York, one of the world's most famous concert venues. In recognition of her success, the educators and staff at CBHS have chosen to give Kucine the 2025 Distinguished Alumni Award. It wasn’t an honor she was expecting.

Kucine first sang opera in front of an audience at CBHS.

“When I was a junior at Casco Bay, we had a winter festival where there was a talent contest,” she said. “I wasn’t planning on entering it. In our crew, someone else was going to represent our homeroom, but that person was sick or didn’t show up that day.”

Two seniors, Alex Perkins and Noah Lupica, who were friends of Kucine’s and knew she sang opera, encouraged her to enter the contest. She made it to the finals and had to sing in front of the school.

“I had practiced opera at home, I sang with my voice teacher, but I had never sung it for all my classmates, let alone teachers and everyone else,” she said. “I was singing an Italian piece called ‘O mio babbino caro.’ I gave the translation and what was happening and then I just sang it acapella. After it was done–it was the loudest applause. People loved it so much.”

Kucine won the contest, but that didn’t matter, she said. What mattered was that so many teachers and students approached her after that initial performance that she decided to pursue opera as a career.

“I didn’t really know until I sang for the school what a positive effect music had on other people,” Kucine said.

Between her junior and senior years, Kucine went to Interlochen Arts Camp, a highly competitive summer program for young artists. Teachers there prepared her for the auditions she would need to go through to get into a college music program.

In her senior year, Kucine traveled to Boston, upstate New York, Washington DC, and more to audition for those programs. Her family did not have a lot of money at the time, she said, so she made the trips alone while other prospective students traveled with family or friends. She took flights and long bus rides, then rehearsed and auditioned on her own. Through it, she was supported by the team at Casco Bay. Stephanie Doyle, Kucine’s college counselor, even drove her to Boston for one audition.

“It was so incredible to have the support of the college counselor, for her to drive me four hours roundtrip,” Kucine said. Doyle waited for Kucine outside the audition room in Boston, with some mistaking her for Kucine’s mother. “Everyone was so supportive. It’s such an amazing community at Casco Bay. Having the support of the teachers at Casco Bay went way further than just the classroom.”

Kucine did a virtual audition in Boston for the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she studied under Deborah Voigt, a world-renowned soprano who had inspired Kucine to begin singing opera as a girl after seeing a video of Voigt on YouTube. After Kucine earned her bachelor’s degree in San Francisco, Voigt recommended she go to New York to study under Ruth Falcon, Voigt’s own master teacher, at the Mannes School of Music. Kucine left school for a time to enter top apprenticeship programs, but returned to finish her master’s degree in 2019. Then, the pandemic hit.

“Everything stopped,” Kucine said. “I was working up until March 13, but then the opera house shut down.”

Kucine did temp jobs to pay the bills through the pandemic, but kept up her practice and returned to the stage in a big way. Her first performance after the pandemic was as a soloist at Carnegie Hall in 2022.

“That was one of my dream places to perform,” she said. “It was a bucket list item and I couldn’t believe that the first gig I had coming out of the pandemic was this huge milestone.”

Kucine’s career has shot off since her Carnegie Hall debut, and her work isn’t limited to the stage. To make her way through the pandemic, Kucine began giving private voice and piano lessons via Zoom. Post-pandemic, she and her partner have founded a private lessons music company, Upper East Side Music. They’re also working on building a foundation so that young children going through cancer treatment can take music lessons.

“In the beginning of 2023, I started teaching this young boy piano twice a week,” she said. “He was undergoing chemotherapy at the hospital down the street from us. As he was going through his treatment, I was giving him music lessons two times a week. He was four years old–very young to be studying piano anyway, but also to be undergoing treatment and taking piano? It was incredible.”

The boy's family told Kucine that her lessons had made a major impact on him during his treatment, giving him a sense of normalcy. Kucine is now working with her cousin, a doctor at the hospital, so more kids can have private lessons while undergoing treatments in hopes of bringing something positive into their lives.

Kucine is currently learning the part of Juliette for Charles Gounod’s French opera Roméo et Juliette. It’s been her dream role since her days at Casco Bay and sang a song from it during her auditions for college.

“There was one aria–like a song from an opera–that I did in high school when I was preparing for auditions,” she said. “Ms. McGinty, the French teacher–who wasn’t even my teacher!–would take time during her day to meet with me one-on-one to go over the pronunciations from this one song, ‘Je veux vivre.’ The teachers just cared about you as a human on top of academically as a student." She is so thankful for her family, friends, and school community. They have greatly influenced the person she is today.