Diana Damrau

Even though she is a celebrated operatic star with many brilliant coloratura roles in her repertoire, Diana Damrau is also a versatile performer in many other styles of vocal music, including concert arias, art songs, pop standards, and songs from musicals and movies. Because she embraces such a wide range of material with affection and technical ease, she is able to move gracefully between the worlds of Viennese operetta, Broadway show tunes, and music from Disney films, with only the slightest indications from her well-supported vocal production and crisp diction that she is much better known for her performances of Mozart, Donizetti, Verdi, and Strauss.

“A strong and pleasing voice, in both high and low notes – a combination which one rarely encounters,” ran one contemporary report of Catarina Cavalieri, the soprano who created Konstanze in Die Entführung. Though I’d put it rather less laconically, that verdict holds equally good for Diana Damrau, whose new Mozart recital includes two arias composed for Cavalieri, “Martern aller Arten” and Elvira’s “Mi tradì” (added for the 1788 Viennese revival of Don Giovanni). The glamorous German soprano, now in her mid-thirties, made her international reputation as a sensational Queen of the Night and Zerbinetta.

Soprano Diana Damrau assumes the crowns of three different Tudor queens, the central characters in operas by Donizetti: Anne Boleyn (Anna Bolena), Mary, Queen of Scots (Maria Stuarda), and Elizabeth I (Roberto Devereux). With Antonio Pappano and the Orchestra and Chorus of Rome’s Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, she performs the substantial and climactic final scene of each work. When Damrau sang Maria Stuarda at the Zurich Opera, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung wrote: “She commands a voice that seems to have no limits. Her coloratura is stunning, her vocal range impressive, and her dynamic shadings are breath-taking. Damrau is in a class of her own.”

Diana Damrau’s primacy as an interpreter of Violetta Valéry in La traviata can be inferred from the names of theatres where she has performed Verdi’s most popular opera: the Metropolitan, New York; La Scala, Milan; London’s Royal Opera House; the Bavarian State Opera in Munich and the Zurich Opera. Paris’s Opéra Bastille joined that list of leading houses in June 2014, when the German soprano appeared in a new production by the film director Benoît Jacquot. Conducted by Francesco Ivan Ciampa, it is presented on this DVD release from Warner Classics, which joins a DVD of Verdi’s Rigoletto, with Damrau as Gilda, recorded in Dresden and released in 2010, and the recent CD release of the soprano’s spine-tingling interpretation of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, recorded live in Munich.

For me, Strauss is one of the greatest composers," Diana Damrau has said. "The way he handles the soprano voice is a joy. And to be able to sing his music with my voice feels like coming home." The centrepiece of this album of Strauss songs is the sublime Vier letzte Lieder, in which Damrau - born and trained in Bavaria - joins forces with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and it's long-standing Chief Conductor Mariss Jansons. Her partner in a tempting and diverse selection of songs with piano is Helmut Deutsch. "Not only is Strauss's music gorgeous," says Damrau, "there's the way he combines words and notes - and the psychology.

Diana Damrau first made her mark as a sensational Queen of the Night – a part she has just relinquished – and has garnered rave reviews in roles such as Konstanze, Zerbinetta and Rossini’s Rosina. One or two other coloratura sopranos today can match her diamantine brilliance and agility, but few, if any, command such fullness in the middle and lower ranges.

Soprano Diana Damrau assumes the crowns of three different Tudor queens, the central characters in operas by Donizetti: Anne Boleyn (Anna Bolena), Mary, Queen of Scots (Maria Stuarda), and Elizabeth I (Roberto Devereux). With Antonio Pappano and the Orchestra and Chorus of Rome’s Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, she performs the substantial and climactic final scene of each work. When Damrau sang Maria Stuarda at the Zurich Opera, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung wrote: “She commands a voice that seems to have no limits. Her coloratura is stunning, her vocal range impressive, and her dynamic shadings are breath-taking. Damrau is in a class of her own.”

Diana Damrau gave her first performance as Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor at the Metropolitan Opera in October 2008, to much critical acclaim. This recording with the Munich Opera followed almost five years later, in July 2013, showing that she has staying power in the ultimate coloratura role. The Munich performance was conducted by Jesús López-Cobos, and Damrau was joined by an exceptional cast, which included Joseph Calleja as Edgardo, Ludovic Tézier as Enrico, and Nicolas Testé as Raimondo.