���غ���

Italian bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni has emerged as an important specialist in in operatic roles of Mozart and Handel. In opera and also in concert choral music roles, he has sung with top conductors in both the modern-instrument and historical-performance fields.

Pisaroni was born in Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela, on June 8, 1975. His family was Italian, and they moved back to Italy when he was four; Pisaroni grew up there in Busseto, the hometown of Verdi. He attended the opera often with his father as a child, and by the time he was 11 he had settled on an operatic career. Pisaroni took lessons at a local school run by famed tenor Carlo Bergonzi; although he did not study directly with Bergonzi, he heard him sing and teach, and he counts Bergonzi as an influence. Pisaroni enrolled at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan but then traveled to New York and Buenos Aires for lessons with Renato Sassola and Rosita Zozulya, respectively.

Pisaroni made his debut as Figaro in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro in Klagenfurt, Austria, in 2001 and quickly found other roles; that year he earned the Vienna State Opera's Eberhard Wächter Medal as a leading artist of the new generation. He sang the bass part in Haydn's Mass in D minor, Hob. 22/11 ("Lord Nelson Mass"), at the 2002 Salzburg Festival and parlayed that successful appearance into roles at the festival by Mozart, Gluck, and Rossini. Since then, Pisaroni's career has focused but not been restricted to Mozart and Handel roles. He has appeared as Figaro at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, as Melisso in Handel's Alcina at the Opéra Bastille in Paris, and in several roles, including Guglielmo in Mozart's Così fan tutte at England's Glyndebourne Festival, among many other major venues.

Pisaroni's recordings have been devoted mostly to Handel and Mozart, including a starring role in conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin's 2015 live recording of Le nozze di Figaro on Deutsche Grammophon. In 2018, however, he appeared in a San Francisco Symphony recording of Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette. Pisaroni received an Opera News award in 2019. ~ James Manheim

Christiane Karg is one of Germany's most active and versatile sopranos, with a large repertory stretching from the Baroque to contemporary music. Karg has appeared widely around Europe and beyond in opera, concert and choral music, and song recitals.

Karg was born in Feuchtwangen in central Bavaria, West Germany, on August 6, 1980. Showing musical talent early, Karg took lessons on piano and flute as a child but switched to singing at age 14 after attending opera performances. She won Bavarian and German federal prizes as a teen and was admitted to the Mozarteum in Salzburg, where she studied voice with Heiner Hopfner and lieder singing with Wolfgang Holzmair. Karg moved on to the Verona Conservatory in Italy, studying Italian opera. Karg rounded out her education with master classes with Grace Bumbry, Ann Murray, and Mirella Freni, among others. She began her career as part of the International Opera Studio at the Staatsoper in Hamburg, moving on to the company of the Frankfurt Opera in 2008. Two years later, she issued her solo album debut, Verwandlung: Lieder eines Jahres, on the Berlin Classics label with accompanist Burkhard Kehring.

Karg has sung at many European opera houses, including the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, the Royal Opera at Covent Garden in London, and the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Her recital career has included appearances at the Konzerthaus in Vienna, Carnegie Hall in New York, and Wigmore Hall in London. Karg has been a prominent figure at festivals, including the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival (with the NDR Symphony Orchestra), Lower Saxony Music Days, and the Heidelberg Spring. She is also the creator of KunstKlang, a festival held in her hometown of Feuchtwangen since 2014, as well as "be part of it! - Musik für Alle," a youth music education program. She has gone on to record for Deutsche Grammophon, Profil, and Harmonia Mundi, where she issued the album Erinnerung: Mahler Lieder in 2020. In 2021, Karg released the holiday album Licht der Welt: A Christmas Promenade on Harmonia Mundi. She moved to BR Klassik, the label of Germany's Bavarian Radio, for a 2022 recital of songs by Debussy and Reynaldo Hahn. The following year, she was heard on a recording of Mahler's Symphony No. 2 in C minor ("Resurrection") with Semyon Bychkov conducting the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. ~ James Manheim

Soprano Sonya Yoncheva rocketed to prominence in the mid-2010s with a series of appearances at top houses. Her background is unusual in that it was closely associated with Baroque music. As her career has developed, it has included that repertory but has also encompassed traditional 19th century works.

Yoncheva was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria's second city, on December 25, 1981. She began intensive music studies at age six and never looked back, studying piano and voice at Bulgaria's National School for Music and Dance. Another unusual feature of her career was a stint as a television music show host as a teenager. Far from distracting her from her goals, the experience, Yoncheva has said, helped her overcome her shyness and combat stage fright.

Yoncheva won several singing competitions in Bulgaria, including one in which she performed with her brother, a rock singer. She came to the attention of Western musicians after enrolling at the Geneva Conservatory, where her teacher was Danielle Borst. She earned a Master's degree there in 2009, and by that time, her operatic career was already well underway: she had caught the attention of the Baroque opera conductor William Christie and joined his Jardin des Voix training program in 2007. With Christie, she has appeared in touring productions of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and, more unusually, Rameau's Les Indes galantes. Yoncheva has also worked with conductor Emmanuelle Haïm in productions of Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea (recorded for DVD release), among other operas.

Signed to Sony Classical in 2013, Yoncheva became a first-string replacement artist for ailing sopranos at major houses. She made a splash at the Metropolitan Opera in 2013 as a last-minute substitute in Verdi's Rigoletto, earning raves from New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini. Her Met debut as Mimi in La bohème followed the next year, just five weeks after the birth of a son, Mateo, to Yoncheva and conductor Domingo Hindoyan. Yoncheva released her debut album, Paris, Mon Amour, in 2014. Another substitute slot, for a touring production of Gounod's Faust, in which Yoncheva replaced Anna Netrebko, brought her to the attention of new European audiences, and in 2015, she won the ECHO Klassik Award as Best Newcomer. The year 2016 brought fresh triumphs: Yoncheva appeared as Bellini's Norma at the Royal Opera House in London, and she released a collection of arias by Handel and Purcell, playing to her Baroque strong suit.

Yoncheva made her debut in 2017 at La Scala in Milan as Mimi in Puccini's La bohème, and she continued a string of critically well-received appearances at top houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, where during the 2017-2018 season, she appeared in three of the house's nationally distributed movie theater broadcasts. Yoncheva remained active during the 2020-2021 coronavirus pandemic, performing the soprano part in Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, at Victoria Hall in Geneva and participating in a concert at the Staatsoper unter den Linden in Berlin that was sponsored by watchmaker Rolex and raised funds for musicians hurt by cancellations. Yoncheva's recording career continued on Sony Classical with The Verdi Album in 2018 and Rebirth, a collection of early music that also included an ABBA song in 2021. ~ James Manheim

American singer Thomas Hampson has been one of the world's top opera stars since the early 1990s, with more than 200 recordings to his credit. Hampson combines a mellifluous tone that has proven remarkably durable, a powerful top, and charisma that saw him named one of the world's 50 most beautiful people by the U.S. magazine People in 1993.

Hampson was born on June 28, 1955, in Elkhart, Indiana, but grew up in Spokane, Washington. He and his two older sisters sang in church, but at first, he was unsure of his career choice: he attended Eastern Washington University, graduating with a government major, but also earned a voice degree from Fort Wright College. Summer classes at the Music Academy of the West with baritone Martial Singher and a second-place finish in the Metropolitan Opera's Western Region auditions in 1980 tipped the scales. Hampson traveled to Europe for auditions, studying with contralto Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and joining the company of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf in 1981. Engaged for bigger and better roles, he joined the Zurich Opera in 1984, gave a Wigmore Hall debut recital touted by Schwarzkopf, made his Metropolitan Opera debut as Count Almaviva in 1986, and by the late '80s was clearly one of opera's top rising stars. Performing in several famed readings of Mahler works conducted late in life by Leonard Bernstein cemented his reputation; a 1986 recording of Mahler's Symphony No. 6 in A minor with Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic was an early recording triumph.

Since then, there is hardly a major world opera house or concert venue in which he has not appeared. Hampson has had a flair for highly visible public performances, such as a 1991 Live from Lincoln Center television broadcast of Copland's Old American Songs with the New York Philharmonic and a 2009 recital at the Supreme Court of the United States, populated by opera-loving justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia. Yet he has also championed new music, giving world premieres of operas by Richard Danielpour, Michael Daugherty, and others. He has a repertory of nearly 100 operas, spanning the genre's entire temporal range, taking up new darker-toned roles such as Amfortas in Wagner's Parsifal and Scarpia in Puccini's Tosca in middle age. He has continued to specialize in Mahler, whose large-scale but lyric music fits his voice beautifully.

Yet Hampson has also been clearly defined as an American singer, performing repertory from that country, teaching and serving on the board of the Manhattan School of Music, and winning induction into the elite American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010. That year, he participated in the first broadcast of classical music on a streaming mobile phone app, teaching a master class in Mahler song at the Manhattan School of Music. He has also been open to crossover projects, such as a CNN television musical exchange with South African vocal harmony group Ladysmith Black Mambazo in 2012. The pace of Hampson's recording career did not slow in the late 2010s and early 2020s; the year 2018 saw his debut on the Cedille label with a song recital, Songs from Chicago. In 2023, he released a pair of albums, appearing on a Capriccio recording of Kurt Weill's cantata Propheten and issuing an album of Liszt orchestral songs on Aparté. ~ James Manheim

The Swedish mezzo soprano Anne Sofie von Otter is among the most versatile singers on today's scene, recording and performing opera of various eras and in various languages, art song, oratorio, rock, pop, and jazz. As a song recitalist, collaborating with pianist Bengt Forsberg, she has specialized in unusual and original programming. Von Otter was born in Stockholm on May 9, 1955. Her father was a Swedish diplomat, and her childhood was divided among stints in several countries; she mastered multiple languages as a child. Von Otter enrolled at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, studying with Vera Rosza, Erik Werba, and Geoffrey Parsons. Joining the cast of the Basel Opera in 1983, she made her debut as Alcina in Haydn's Orlando Paladino and singing several "pants" roles including the title role in Rossini's Tancredi. For a time, von Otter specialized in 18th century opera, including the muscular opera seria heroine roles that were just starting to become popular at the end of the 20th century. After multiple audition attempts, von Otter also landed a place in the stable of singers associated with conductor John Eliot Gardiner, performing and recording such works as Handel's Jephtha, Bach's Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248, and St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244, and Mozart's Requiem in D minor, K. 626. Von Otter has performed at La Scala in Milan, Covent Garden in London, and other major European opera houses. With Bengt Forsberg she has released critically acclaimed recitals such as Terezin/Theresienstadt (2007) featuring music written by composers being held in concentration camps. Her artistic scope has only grown as she has aged; in 2016 she joined with the experimental ensemble Brooklyn Rider for a recital of works by composers ranging from Elvis Costello (with whom she had already released a duet album) to Björk, Nico Muhly, Kate Bush, and jazz pianist Brad Mehldau, with whom she recorded the album Love Songs in 2010. She has also recorded mainstream Romantic lieder repertory as well as Swedish art songs. Von Otter released A Simple Song, with Forsberg on the organ, on Sweden's BIS label in late 2018. ~ James Manheim

Touted as a possible successor to Plácido Domingo, Rolando Villazón burst on the scene in the early 2000s with a flurry of appearances at top opera houses around the world. He survived a vocal cord cyst in 2009 and has gone on to become one of the world's top opera stars.

Villazón was born on February 22, 1972, in Fuentes de Satellite, Mexico. Domingo's Perhaps Love album, recorded with John Denver, was the first example of operatic singing Villazón heard. Domingo served as a mentor to Villazón later in his career, and Villazón's voice has frequently been compared to Domingo's. His vocal gift was of the sort that emerges from a well-rounded education in the arts rather than one that shaped his life from childhood. Villazón studied theater, ballet, and modern dance as well as music at the Espacios arts academy. A voice teacher, Arturo Nieto, introduced Villazón to opera when he was 18. He enrolled at Mexico's National Conservatory of Music (studying with Enrique Jaso and Gabriel Mijares), and soon he was taking home top prizes in national vocal competitions. Still, Villazón worked as a history and music teacher, unsure whether to plunge into a full-time operatic career. His girlfriend Lucia decided for him, telling him that she wouldn't marry him unless he pursued his dream. Another fortuitous encounter happened as Villazón was working as a stage manager in an operatic production at Mexico City's Palacio de Bellas Artes. Columbia Artists Management representative Bruce Zemsky happened to be in attendance and, although Villazón wasn't performing, correctly guessed that he was a singer and invited him to audition. The shocked Villazón acquitted himself well enough to keep the relationship with Zemsky going, and eventually he was signed by the powerful agency. Villazón rounded off his education in 1998 with a stint at the San Francisco Opera's "Merola Opera Program" for young singers, taking classes with Joan Sutherland. The following year he made his European debut in Genoa, Italy, with an appearance as des Grieux in Massenet's Manon. Over the next five years, he appeared in a host of European and American houses. Villazón made his Metropolitan Opera debut in the fall of 2003, in Verdi's La Traviata. A highlight of his career was performing La Traviata with Anna Netrebko in a much-acclaimed production at the Salzburg Festival in 2005. Although his focus has been on the Romantic repertoire, he also has extensive experience performing works by Baroque composers, including Monteverdi, Handel, and Vivaldi.

His first appearance on disc came, oddly enough, as the Steersman in Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer. Villazón had sung little German music, but, noted Opera News writer Matthew Gurewitsch, "Villazón comes through in spades, flinging out his song in a blaze of openhearted romance that subsides disarmingly into sleepiness and dreams." Villazón's first solo release, Italian Opera Arias, appeared early in 2004. In the estimation of The Times of London, he was "the real thing, a tenor with star potential and striking individuality." His 2007 album Duets, with Netrebko, was an international best-seller. That year he became a French citizen. There was a break in Villazón's career in 2009 when he had surgery to remove a cyst on his vocal cords, but he was able to resume performing the following year. Since his return to the stage he has specialized in Mozartian tenor roles, but he also issued ¡México!, an album of Mexican popular song standards, in 2010. An appearance on a recording of Handel's Messiah with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir brought Villazón new exposure among U.S. audiences. Beginning in 2013 with a recording of Così fan tutte, the tenor has spearheaded a major new series of Mozart opera recordings on the Deutsche Grammophon label; in 2019, his recording of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) in that series appeared, with Villazón in the role, not of the tenor lead, Tamino, but of the comic baritone Papageno. ~ James Manheim

Although it maintains headquarters in London, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe lives up to its name: the group's roughly 60 members come from all over the European continent as well as Britain. Cultivating relationships with many conductors and venues, the orchestra is especially noteworthy for its recording catalog, which has earned critical acclaim and major awards.

The Chamber Orchestra of Europe was founded in 1981 by a group of young players who had aged out of the European Community Youth Orchestra and wanted to continue making music together. One of the initial movers was Douglas Boyd, who remained the orchestra's lead oboist for many years, and numerous other founding members have remained with the group. The idea of forming a smaller orchestra oriented toward Baroque and Classical repertory was common at the time; less common was the orchestra's democratic structure, which involved a small directorate elected annually by the players. There is no permanent conductor, but the Chamber Orchestra of Europe quickly began to catch the attention of some of the biggest names on the podium. Two years after its formation, the group was tapped by Claudio Abbado for a Deutsche Grammophon recording of Rossini's Il viaggio a Reims. The orchestra has worked with conductors Bernard Haitink, Sakari Oramo, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and many others, and has performed or recorded with top-caliber soloists including Janine Jansen, Emanuel Ax, and Renaud and Gautier Capuçon.

Accordingly, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe tours all over Europe (and sometimes in North America), with no identification with a particular city. These connections have resulted in an unusually deep collection of recordings: since the late '80s, multiple recordings of the orchestra have appeared in almost every year, and 2006 alone saw seven Chamber Orchestra of Europe releases. The group was a European Union cultural ambassador from 2007 until 2013. In 2009, the orchestra established the COE Academy to provide educational opportunities for student performers. Many of the group's recordings feature Baroque or Classical repertory (especially Mozart), but not all; in 2018, the orchestra issued Visions of Prokofiev on Deutsche Grammophon. The orchestra's vast, critically acclaimed recording catalog has earned two Grammy Awards and three Record of the Year Awards from Gramophone magazine. In 2020, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, led by Harnoncourt, was heard on a live recording of Schubert's symphonies made at the Styriarte festival in Graz, Austria, in 1988. The following year, the orchestra and Harnoncourt were heard on an album of works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms; these recordings were made at the same festival spanning from 1989 through 2007. The Chamber Orchestra of Europe is a nonprofit organization and a registered charity in Britain. ~ James Manheim

Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin has had one of the most meteoric rises of any conductor of the early 21st century. Since conducting virtually all of the major Canadian orchestras while still in his twenties, he has established a substantial international career.

Nézet-Séguin was born in Montreal on March 6, 1975. He began studying piano at age five and decided on a career as a conductor at age ten after attending a performance by the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal under Charles Dutoit. He studied piano, chamber music, conducting, and composition at the Conservatoire de Musique du Québec, and he studied choral conducting at Westminster Choir College. When he was 14, he began leading rehearsals of the Chœur polyphonique de Montréal at the Montréal Cathedral; he became the group's conductor in 1994, at age 19. That same year, Nézet-Séguin, who had a lifelong admiration for the work of Carlo Maria Giulini, was invited to follow the famed conductor for a year, observing rehearsals and concerts and working extensively with Giulini during his final year of public performances. In 1995, Nézet-Séguin founded Le Chapelle de Montréal, a vocal and instrumental group that began with a focus on the Baroque. He continued performing with this group until 2002.

From 1998 until 2002, Nézet-Séguin was the chorus master and assistant conductor of L'Opéra de Montréal. In 2000, he was named the artistic director and principal conductor of Orchestre Métropolitain du Montréal. From 2008 until 2018, he served as conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, succeeding Valery Gergiev. From 2008 until 2014, he was the principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. In 2012, Nézet-Séguin succeeded Dutoit as the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra. In 2018, he was named the music director of the Metropolitan Opera, following annual appearances leading the company. He also took on the title of Honorary Conductor with the Rotterdam Philharmonic in 2018. The following year, after extending his contract several times, the Orchestre Métropolitain du Montréal awarded Nézet-Séguin a lifetime contract.

Nézet-Séguin records mainly for Deutsche Grammophon, but he has also recorded for several other labels. In addition, he is active as a pianist and is featured on a number of discs as a soloist or accompanist. In 2019, he released several albums, including Verdi, with the Orchestre Métropolitain du Montréal and soloist Ildar Abdrazakov. An unusually active 2021 saw eight releases, including his first-ever solo piano album, Introspection, and a Grammy Award-winning recording of Florence Price's first and third symphonies with the Philadelphia Orchestra. That year, he was the subject of Patrick Delisle-Crevier's book about his life and career, Raconte-moi Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The following year, he led the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in a cycle of Beethoven's symphonies, and he backed Lisa Batiashvili on her album Secret Love Letters, once again with the Philadelphia Orchestra. ~ Stephen Eddins & Keith Finke

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was not only one of the greatest composers of the Classical period, but one of the greatest of all time. Surprisingly, he is not identified with radical formal or harmonic innovations, or with the profound kind of symbolism heard in some of Bach's works. Mozart's best music has a natural flow and irresistible charm, and can express humor, joy or sorrow with both conviction and mastery. His operas, especially his later efforts, are brilliant examples of high art, as are many of his piano concertos and later symphonies. Even his lesser compositions and juvenile works feature much attractive and often masterful music.

Mozart was the last of seven children, of whom five did not survive early childhood. By the age of three he was playing the clavichord, and at four he began writing short compositions. Young Wolfgang gave his first public performance at the age of five at Salzburg University, and in January 1762, he performed on harpsichord for the Elector of Bavaria. There are many astonishing accounts of the young Mozart's precocity and genius. At the age of seven, for instance, he picked up a violin at a musical gathering and sight-read the second part of a work with complete accuracy, despite his never having had a violin lesson.

In the years 1763-1766, Mozart, along with his father Leopold, a composer and musician, and sister Nannerl, also a musically talented child, toured London, Paris, and other parts of Europe, giving many successful concerts and performing before royalty. The Mozart family returned to Salzburg in November 1766. The following year young Wolfgang composed his first opera, Apollo et Hyacinthus. Keyboard concertos and other major works also came from his pen.

In 1769, Mozart was appointed Konzertmeister at the Salzburg Court by the Archbishop. Beginning that same year, the Mozarts made three tours of Italy, where the young composer studied Italian opera and produced two successful efforts, Mitridate and Lucio Silla. In 1773, Mozart was back in Austria, where he spent most of the next few years composing. He wrote all his violin concertos between 1774 and 1777, as well as Masses, symphonies, and chamber works.

In 1780, Mozart wrote his opera Idomeneo, which became a sensation in Munich. After a conflict with the Archbishop, Mozart left his Konzertmeister post and settled in Vienna. He received a number of commissions and took on a well-paying but unimportant Court post. In 1782 Mozart married Constanze Weber and took her to Salzburg the following year to introduce her to his family. 1782 was also the year that saw his opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail staged with great success.

In 1784, Mozart joined the Freemasons, apparently embracing the teachings of that group. He would later write music for certain Masonic lodges. In the early and mid-1780s, Mozart composed many sonatas and quartets, and often appeared as soloist in the 15 piano concertos he wrote during this period. Many of his commissions were for operas now, and Mozart met them with a string of masterpieces. Le nozze di Figaro came 1786, Don Giovanni in 1787, Così fan tutte in 1790, and Die Zauberflöte in 1791. Mozart made a number of trips in his last years, and while his health had been fragile in previous times, he displayed no serious condition or illness until he developed a fever of unknown origin near the end of 1791. ~ Robert Cummings