Anja Harteros

The soprano Anja Harteros, who was born to a Greek father and a German mother in Bergneustadt, Germany, studied at the Cologne University of Music. Her first permanent engagement began in 1996 with Bonn Opera, and in 1999 her international career was launched when she won the BBC Singer of the World Competition. Soon thereafter she was invited to sing at the world’s major opera venues, including the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House in London, the Vienna, Berlin, Munich, and the Dresden Staatsoper companies, as well as to Amsterdam, Paris, and the Salzburg Festival. Her repertoire encompasses lyric dramatic soprano roles in Italian as well as German operas: Verdi’s Vio-
letta Valéry, Elisabetta, Leonora, Desdemona, and Alice Ford and Puccini’s Mimì and Tosca on the one hand, for example, and, on the other, Wagner’s Eva, Elsa, and Elisabeth and such Strauss heroines as Arabella, the Marschallin, and Ariadne, which she will sing for the first time in the fall of 2015 at the Bavarian Staatsoper. Harteros has moreover performed in Baroque works and as a Mozart soprano, working with numerous acclaimed conductors including Daniel Barenboim, John Eliot Gardiner, Bernard Haitink, Daniel Harding, Mariss Jansons, Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Muti, Antonio Pappano, and Christian Thielemann. Among her recordings are the Four Last Songs by Strauss, the Verdi Requiem, and the lieder recital Von ewiger Liebe (“Of Eternal Love”), which won the French culture critics’ Orphée d’Or award. In 2007 Anja Harteros was named a Kammersängerin of the Bavarian Staatsoper, in 2009 she was voted Singer of the Year by the critics of Opernwelt, and in 2010 she received the Opera Prize in Cologne.

One previous LUCERNE FESTIVAL performance: on 29 August 2012 in Verdi’s Requiem under the direction of Daniel Barenboim.

August 2015