Please note that because of the Covid−19 pandemic, we are currently unable to provide reliable information about forthcoming live performances.
Challenging conventions and pushing boundaries, Emily D’Angelo is a musical force to be reckoned with. With her striking stage presence, vocal authority and expressive artistry, the singer has taken the opera and concert world by storm in recent years. For Montreal’s French-language newspaper Le Devoir, and for a growing army of fans, she is quite simply “a phenomenon”.
D’Angelo signed an exclusive agreement with Deutsche Grammophon in May 2021 and her debut album, enargeia, is set for release in October 2021. The recording was initially inspired by the medieval abbess and polymath Hildegard of Bingen, whose music D’Angelo sings here in new arrangements by leading American composers Missy Mazzoli and Sarah Kirkland Snider. enargeia also features original pieces by both Mazzoli and Snider, together with two works by the Grammy-winning Hildur Guðnadóttir.
Although she is known for her wide-ranging repertoire and for championing contemporary composers, D’Angelo has a special relationship with the music of Mozart. Her innate feeling for his roles was clear from the moment of her stage debut as Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro at the Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi in 2016, and has subsequently deepened with strikingly successful debut performances at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Milan’s Teatro alla Scala and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. The London Telegraph hailed her interpretation of Sesto in La clemenza di Tito for the Royal Opera’s first post-lockdown staging in May 2021 as a “barnstorming role and house debut”, echoing the critical acclaim given four months earlier to her portrayal of Dorabella for La Scala’s live-streamed staging of Così fan tutte, as summed up by OperaLibera: “D’Angelo brought the beautiful dark colours of her voice to the role of Dorabella and is clearly at home in Mozart’s writing.”
Emily D’Angelo was born in Toronto in 1994 to a musical family. Encouraged to sing from an early age by her parents and pianist grandmother, she built a solid foundation for her musicianship as a member of the Toronto Children’s Chorus. She studied cello in secondary school before completing her bachelor’s degree in Music at the University of Toronto, after which she joined the Canadian Opera Company’s Ensemble Studio. In the summers of 2014 and 2015 D’Angelo completed a Fellowship at the Ravinia Steans Institute, where she honed her interpretation of and dedication to recital and concert repertoire.
She became a member of the Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artists Development Program in 2017, and made her debut on the Met stage in 2018. That same year, she made her decisive international breakthrough when she became the first contestant to win all four top prizes at the Operalia competition in the event’s 26-year history.
In 2019 D’Angelo became the first vocalist ever to receive the Leonard Bernstein Award from the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival and was chosen by New York’s Lincoln Center as one of its 2020 Emerging Artists. Beyond the opera stage, her credits include engagements with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the world premiere of a song cycle by Ana Sokolović and performances of new music by, among others, Unsuk Chin and Matthew Aucoin.
Recent and forthcoming engagements reflect her status as one of the most exciting performers on today’s opera scene. D’Angelo is set to make her debut at the Munich Opera Festival in July 2021 as Idamante in Idomeneo before turning to Ottavia in L’incoronazione di Poppea for Zurich Opera in September. Her 2021–22 season also includes a return to the Met to sing Prince Charming in Massenet’s Cendrillon and a first outing at the Opéra de Paris as Siébel in Gounod’s Faust.
5/2021