The Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian was born in Vilnius and studied at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre. A founding member of the Vilnius City Opera, she has twice been awarded the Golden Stage Cross, her country’s highest theatre award. In 2022 she received the Premios Ópera XXI and in 2023 she was awarded an Opus Klassik in the category ‘Singer of the Year’.
Her international career began with her triumphantly successful performances as Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly at the Royal Opera in Stockholm and since then she has made a name for herself in many of the world’s leading concert halls and opera houses. In 2016 Stockholm audiences also heard her as Giordano’s Fedora, and she was acclaimed with equal enthusiasm as Marie (Wozzeck) under Markus Stenz at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. In the years that followed she made debuts as Manon Lescaut at the Frankfurt Opera, the Vienna State Opera and the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, sang Marietta (Die tote Stadt) and Lisa (The Queen of Spades) at La Scala, Milan, performed the title role of Iolanta for the Frankfurt Opera and Tatyana (Eugene Onegin) and Cio-Cio-San at the Vienna State Opera, and was invited to return to Stockholm as Cio-Cio-San. She has sung Jenůfa in Vienna, London and Berlin and in 2021 made her Bayreuth Festival debut as Senta (Der fliegende Holländer). She has performed the title role of Rusalka in productions in Madrid, London and, most recently, in Prague and Munich. In 2023 she appeared at the Frankfurt Opera as Nastasya in Tchaikovsky’s The Enchantress, and closed the season at the Vienna State Opera as Nedda (Pagliacci).
Highlights of the 2023/24 season have included her house debuts at the Metropolitan Opera in New York as Cio-Cio-San and at the Hamburg State Opera as Salome, Lisa at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich and her role debut as Turandot at the Vienna State Opera. She has also appeared worldwide in numerous concerts and recitals.
Asmik Grigorian made her Salzburg Festival debut in 2017 as Marie. In 2018 she made a sensational role debut in Salzburg as Salome under Franz Welser-Möst in a production by Romeo Castellucci, for which she was awarded the Austrian Music Theatre Prize in 2019 in the category ‘Best Female Lead’. Since then, she has regularly appeared in Salzburg: in 2020 and 2021 as Chrysothemis (Elektra), in 2022 in the main female roles of all three operas in Puccini’s Il trittico and in 2023 as Lady Macbeth (Macbeth).
