Asmik Grigorian

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 2005 for her role debut as Violetta (La traviata) and in 2010 for her interpretation of Mrs Lovett in Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. At the International Opera Awards she was voted Young Female Singer of the Year in 2016 and Female Singer of the Year in 2019.

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).

As a concert singer Asmik Grigorian has performed at the Teatro del Maggio Musicale in Florence and at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg under Zubin Mehta, and as Iolanta with the Berlin Philharmonic under Kirill Petrenko. In 2022, concert performances of Salome took her on a tour of Japan with the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra. In 2023 she sang Richard Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder with the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome and Palermo and gave a song recital at the Salle Gaveau in Paris. She also toured with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen and Matthias Goerne, performing Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony. Further concert engagements have taken her to La Scala, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Zurich Opera House, and to Grafenegg and Aix-en-Provence.

Asmik Grigorian made her Salzburg Festival debut in 2017 as Marie (Wozzeck). 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’. In 2020 she appeared in Salzburg as Chrysothemis (Elektra) and in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony under Riccardo Muti. In 2022 she performed the principal female roles in all three operas of Puccini’s Il trittico.

She is the official ambassador of the Rimantas Kaukėnas Charitable Foundation.