[1][4] Rolandi's father died in a car accident on Long Island when she was three, and the family moved back to the Carolinas, her mother's home.
[6] Rolandi started out as a violinist, at the age of 6, yet later remembered that "when there was nobody home, I'd turn on opera records and sing along with Tosca and Madama Butterfly.
Her operatic debut, at NYCO, was as Olympia in Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann, stepping in, followed by Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos by Richard Strauss as planned.
[8] Appearing regularly with the NYCO, Rolandi was a leading coloratura soprano with the company for the next 15 years, singing more than 30 operatic roles, including Fortuna and Drusilla in Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea, Cleopatra in Handel's Giulio Cesare, Mozart's Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro and Queen of the Night in Die Zauberflöte, the title roles in Donizetti's La fille du régiment, Lucia di Lammermoor and Elvira in I puritani, Rosina in Rossini's The Barber of Seville, Gilda in Verdi's Rigoletto, the Queen of Shemakha in Rimsky-Korsakov's Le Coq d'or, the title role in Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen, Adele as Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss, Mabel in The Pirates of Penzance, and the title role in Naughty Marietta.
At the Lyric Opera of Chicago she made her debut as Dorinda in Handel's Orlando (1986), and returned to sing Despina in Così fan tutte (1993–94), a production that marked her retirement from the stage.
[8] She first appeared in Europe in 1981 at the Glyndebourne Festival as Zerbinetta, returning in 1984 for Susanna Zdenka in Arabella by Richard Strauss, and Mozart's Konstanze in Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Despina in Così fan tutte.
[1][12] Other major European engagements included Ginevra in Handel's Ariodante and Cleopatra in Geneva, Amenaide in Tancredi in Turin, and Elcia in Mosè in Egitto at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, Italy.
On television, she was the title role in two Live from Lincoln Center opera broadcasts: Lucia di Lammermoor (1982) and The Cunning Little Vixen (1983), and she was Clorinda in an English-language version of La Cenerentola (1980).
[2][1] Rolandi became acquainted with conductor Andrew Davis when he conducted her performances of Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos, both at the Metropolitan Opera in 1984 and again at Glyndebourne in 1988.