Anna Caterina Antonacci

Established as one of the finest Sopranos of her generation, Anna Caterina won prestigious prizes at the Voci Verdiane, Callas and Pavarotti competitions. From the brilliant Rossini of her early years, she moved to Rossini serio and operas including: Mose in Egitto, Semiramide, Elisabetta, Regina d’Inghilterra and Ermione. She introduced into her repertoire Donizetti’s queens, Mozart’s Donna Elvira (Don Giovanni), Elettra (Idomeneo) and Vitellia (La Clemenza di Tito), Gluck’s Armide, staged by Pier Luigi Pizzi and directed by Riccardo Muti followed, which opened the 1996/97 season at La Scala; Alceste in Parma and Salzburg and Cherubini’s Medea in Toulouse and the Theatre du Chatelet. Her triumph as Cassandra in the Chatelet’s 2003 production of Les Troyens with Sir John Eliot Gardiner signaled a shift towards the great heroines of the French repertoire, following in Regine Crespin’s footsteps. In La Juive and Carmen, at Covent Garden under Pappano and the Opera Comique under Gardiner, she revived a tradition of French singing in the spirit of Viardot. Her portrayal of two roles, Poppea and Nero, (L’incoronazione di Poppea) in Paris and Munich inspired Era la notte, her one-woman show. Equally accomplished in the recital hall as on the operatic stage, her relationship with the pianist Donald Sulzen has allowed her to increasingly focus on song, be it Italian (Tosti, Respighi) or French, notably Fauré (L’horizon chimerique), Debussy, Poulenc and Reynaldo Hahn. Career highlights include Carmen at Covent Garden, conducted by Daniel Oren, Les Troyens at La Scala and the Wiener Staatsoper, her debut in Iphigenie en Tauride at the Grand Théâtre de Genève, and new productions by David McVicar’s Gloriana at the Teatro Real Madrid, and Médée at the Grand Théâtre de Genève. Anna Caterina had an opera commissioned for her by Marco Tutino, La Ciociara, which premiered at San Francisco Opera.