Marita Sølberg, winner of The Queen Sonja International Music Competition, prize winner at the Belvedere Competition, Vienna and recipient of the Tom Wilhelmsen Foundation’s Award for overall achievement in Opera, is today considered one of Europe’s leading lyric sopranos. Her luscious sound and personal artistic signature are equally at home in opera and concert. “One rarely hears a voice like this. It is a voice of almost mystic dimensions, great and fully grown and with a veil of the unspoken,…
Marita Sølberg, winner of The Queen Sonja International Music Competition, prize winner at the Belvedere Competition, Vienna and recipient of the Tom Wilhelmsen Foundation’s Award for overall achievement in Opera, is today considered one of Europe’s leading lyric sopranos. Her luscious sound and personal artistic signature are equally at home in opera and concert.
“One rarely hears a voice like this. It is a voice of almost mystic dimensions, great and fully grown and with a veil of the unspoken, as if it is brought forth from a deep secret source.”
(Laagendalsposten)
A principal Artist of the Norwegian National Opera in Oslo and frequent guest with numerous international companies, such as the Wiener Staatsoper, Los Angeles Opera, Glyndebourne Festival and Teatro La Fenice, Venice, Ms Sølberg has thrilled her audiences with memorable performances of a number of leading roles, including Contessa (Le Nozze di Figaro), Pamina (Die Zauberflöte), Giulietta (I Capuleti e i Montecchi), Female Chorus (The Rape of Lucretia), Nedda (Pagliacci), Antonia, (Les Contes d’Hoffmann), Micaëla (Carmen) and Mimì (La Bohème). Her very first performance in La Bohème (Stefan Herheim) resulted in great critical acclaim: “Norwegian soprano Marita Sølberg as an unforgettable Mimì of the highest international standard” (Opera Now), and gained her the Norwegian Music Critics’ Prize. Sølberg has also recently sung and performed with one of the world’s leading orchestras, the Philharmonia Orchestra in London.
Ms Sølberg’s highlights on the concert platform include recitals as well as Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder (Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra), Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem (Orchestre de Paris in Paris and the Wiener Musikverein), Haydn’s Die Schöpfung (Accademia Nazionale Santa Cecilia, Rome), Mahler’s 2. Symphony (Norwegian Radio Orchestra), Bach’s Matthäus-Passion (Les Musiciens de Louvre), and Solveig in Grieg’s Peer Gynt, with the Berliner Philharmoniker. Conductors she has collaborated with include Zubin Mehta, Marc Minkowski, Michel Plasson, Neeme Järvi and John Fiore. Marita Sølberg’s discography includes Peer Gynt and Grieg’s orchestral songs with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra.
December 2015