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Christiane Oelze is one of the leading German sopranos to have emerged in the latter decades of the 20th century. Her repertory includes a broad range of works in the operatic, concert, and lieder realms by composers, including J.S. Bach, Mozart, Richard Strauss, Schubert, Brahms, Mahler, and Schoenberg. She possesses a bright, somewhat delicate voice whose graceful quality makes her style both uniquely appealing and easily recognizable.

Oelze was born in Cologne, Germany, on October 9, 1963. Her first important study came at the Musikhochschule in Cologne with Klesie Kelly-Moog. She later took master classes with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and then had further vocal training with Erna Westberger.

She won a prize at the 1987 Hugo Wolf Competition, and then the following year took first prize at the German Intercollegiate Competition for Vocal Duos. In the 1980s she focused mainly on concert work, including singing in many oratorios, as well as solo concerts featuring lieder. During this initial phase she drew critical praise on her several tours in Europe, Japan, and the United States. In 1990 she launched her operatic career in Ottawa, Canada, in the role of Despina in Mozart's Così fan tutte.

Her next major appearance on the operatic stage was as Constanze in Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail at the 1991 Salzburg Festival, and she later reprised the role in Zurich. Her first recordings appeared in the early '90s, with discs on the Berlin Classics label of Goethe lieder by various composers (1993) and another of Handel's Jephtha (1994). Other recordings by Mozart and J.S. Bach soon followed, while her stage appearances included a string of triumphs: at Glyndebourne she portrayed Anne Trulove in Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1994) and Melisande in Debussy's Pelléas and Mélisande (1999); and she had similar successes in different repertory at Covent Garden during this period. In the new century, Oelze has remained busy on all fronts: she returned to Glyndebourne several more times, including for the 2003 production of Mozart's Idomeneo, singing Ilia, with Simon Rattle conducting, and in 2006 she sang the Countess in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro at Opera Garnier, Paris. Her recordings have continued to draw critical praise in the new century, as well, among them the 2005 release of the Fauré Requiem on the PentaTone label.

From 2003-2008, Oelze taught at the Robert Schumann Hochschule. Between 2010 and 2011, she also added performances of Strauss' Vier letzte Lider with the Israel Philharmonic and Christoph von Dohnányi, Brahms' Requiem with the Orchestre National de France and Hartmut Haenchen, and concerts with the Bamberger Symphoniker, among others.

Simon Keenlyside is a leading British baritone, concert and recital singer. His voice is distinguished by its warmth, with the ability to take on an edge for dramatic lines. As a student at Cambridge he studied zoology, but went on to study singing with John Cameron at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. While studying there, he sang the leading male role of Lescaut in Puccini's opera Manon.

His professional debut was with the Hamburg State Opera in 1988, as Count Almaviva in Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro. After that, he was engaged as a member of the Scottish Opera, where he remained until 1994. During that period he was praised for his appearances as Britten's Billy Budd, Rossini's Figaro, Marcello in Puccini's La Bohème, Danilow in Lehar's The Merry Widow, Belcore in Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore, and Mozart's Papageno.

He debuted at Covent Garden in 1989 as Silvio in Leoncavallo's Pagliacci and subsequently as Guglielmo in Mozart's Così fan Tutte. The years 1995 - 1997 saw him make major debuts: At Glyndebourne in 1995, again as Guglielmo, and as Pagapeno under Riccardo Muti at La Scala. In 1996 he appeared at the Metropolitan, again as Belcore, and in San Francisco in 1997 as Debussy's Pelléas. He made a strong impression singing the title role in a revival of Ambroise Thomas' once ubiquitous opera Hamlet, one of the few late Romantic operas wherein the title role is for a baritone. He was praised for having captured the inward struggle of Shakespeare's most complex protagonist.

He has since appeared in Paris (Papageno in Die Zauberflöte, Guglielmo in Così fan tutte), at La Scala in Milan (Count Almaviva) in Le Nozze di Figaro led by Muti. The San Francisco Opera provided his U.S. opera debut in 1993. He also worked in Sydney and Berlin (title role, Il Barbiere di Siviglia), Geneva (title role, Hamlet), Ferrara (title role of Don Giovanni) under Claudio Abbado, and at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden (Marcello in La Bohème) under Bernard Haitink, as well as Guglielmo, Belcore and Count Almaviva. He also returned to La Scala (Die Zauberflöte, Gluck's Armide) and to Paris (Dandini in La Cenerentola, Yeletsky in The Queen of Spades), and in 2000 made his Vienna State Opera debut (La Bohème), and sings the title role of Monteverdi's Orfeo in Brussels.

He joined the "authentic performances" movement in opera in 1998-1999, when he toured with conductor Rene Jacobs as Monteverdi's Orfeo. Other acclaimed roles are Yeletsky (Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades), Mercutio (Gounod's Roméo et Juliette, Wolfram, Dandini (Rossini's La Cenerentola), and Ned Keene (Britten's Peter Grimes).

He frequently appears on the concert stage with such orchestras and conductors as the Israel Philharmonic under Mehta, The Chamber Orchestra of Europe the Berlin Philharmonic with Abbado, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Rattle, the London Symphony Orchestra led by Davis, and with Boulez and the Vienna Philharmonic. He has sung recitals in the leading European cities and festivals, and in New York.

On recordings, he has sung the parts of Don Giovanni and Ned Keene. For the Hyperion label he was selected to sing five volumes of their remarkable project to record the complete Lieder of Franz Schubert, and also recorded a two-disc set of Robert Schumann songs, the complete Odes and Welcome Songs of Purcell, a role in Chabrier's incomplete opera Briseis, the Duruflé Requiem, and the complete Purcell realizations by Benjamin Britten. Furthermore, both the Royal Philharmonic Society and the Critics Circle named him Singer of the Year in 1995.

Conductor Christian Thielemann has been a major force in both operatic and symphonic music in his native Germany, serving since 2012 as conductor of the Staatskapelle Dresden. He is considered one of the world's top interpreters of the music of Wagner and Richard Strauss.

Thielemann was born in what was then West Berlin on April 1, 1959. As a youth, he took lessons on several instruments, played viola in the German Youth Orchestra, and studied at Berlin's Hochschule für Musik. Thielemann's career began early as he landed posts as assistant to conductor Heinrich Hollreiser at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, when he was just 19, and then to Herbert von Karajan at the Berlin Philharmonic. He also served as an assistant to Daniel Barenboim at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. In 1985, Thielemann got his first principal conductor post, with the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf. He held successively more important operatic posts, becoming general music director of the Nuremberg Opera in 1988 and rising to the same post at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1997. Although most of his activities were in Germany, he was principal guest conductor at the Teatro Comunale of Bologna in the '90s and made guest appearances with the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the San Francisco Opera, among other top companies abroad.

Thielemann made his first conducting appearance at the Bayreuth Festival in 2000, and soon he became a favorite of festival director Wolfgang Wagner, grandson of composer Richard Wagner, to whose works Bayreuth has served as a kind of shrine. He became chief musical advisor at Bayreuth in 2008 and has continued to conduct Wagner performances there, although he left his formal post in 2021. In 2000, a letter appeared in the Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung quoting an anti-Semitic remark by an unnamed figure in Berlin's musical establishment and aimed at Barenboim's directorship of the Berlin State Opera. It was alleged that the statement had come from Thielemann, who denied it vociferously; Barenboim said that in the absence of solid evidence, he accepted Thielemann's claim. Whatever his political views, Thielemann qualifies as a cultural conservative; he rarely conducts music from later than the early 20th century, and this has held true even as more of his activities have been devoted to instrumental music.

As chief conductor of the Münchener Philharmoniker ("Munich Philharmonic") from 2004 to 2011, and of the Staatskapelle Dresden ("Dresden State Orchestra") since 2012, he has emphasized German and Austrian music from Mozart to Bruckner in his repertory. He will leave the Staatskapelle Dresden in 2024. In 2015, Thielemann was in the running for the coveted post of music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, but orchestra members split between him and Andris Nelsons. Eventually, a third candidate, Kirill Petrenko, was appointed. Thielemann serves as director of the Salzburg Easter Festival, departing in 2021. He has made many recordings with the Münchener Philharmoniker and the Staatskapelle Dresden, most of them released on the Deutsche Grammophon label, and in 2019, he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic's popular annual New Year's Concert for the first time. Thielemann has continued to record prolifically with the Staatskapelle Dresden and increasingly often with the Vienna Philharmonic; with the latter group, he began a cycle of live performances of Bruckner symphonies on Sony Classical, the same label that had issued his Beethoven and Schumann cycles. In 2022, his recording of Bruckner's Symphony No. 2 in C minor appeared. By that time, his catalog comprised more than 75 recordings. ~ James Manheim