Katrien Baerts

The Belgian soprano Katrien Baerts is known for her powerful and sensual voice, and is particularly in demand as a performer of contemporary music. In this capacity she sang in Beat Furrer’s Begehren at the Salzburg Festival in 2018, in the world premiere of Robert Zuidam’s Suster Bertken, as Clara in Theo Loevendie’s The Rise of Spinoza at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and in the title role of Tony Prabowo’s Gandari in Jakarta. She has also appeared in Die Fremden in Ghent and at the Ruhrtriennale and in Kris Defoort’s House of the Sleeping Beauties in Tokyo. In summer 2021 she returned to the Ruhrtriennale as Theodora in Olga Neuwirth’s Bählamms Fest with the Ensemble Modern, and sang in the world premiere of Oscar Bettison’s The Light of Lesser Days with the Asko|Schönberg Ensemble. Other career highlights have included her debut as Lulu at the Dutch National Opera and her debut at the Barbican Centre performing music by Harrison Birtwistle.

She has sung Grisey’s Quatre Chants pour franchir le seuil with Sylvain Cambreling and Klangforum Wien, and performed Jan-Peter de Graaff’s monodrama Parallax (written for her) with Het Collectief. With Het Collectief she has also given concerts celebrating the Second Viennese School, in which she performed works such as Schoenberg’s Six Orchestral Songs and Berg’s Altenberg Lieder at the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam, and pieces by Berg and Zemlinsky at the Heidelberg Spring Festival.

Katrien Baerts’s wide-ranging concert repertory reaches from the Baroque to new works, and includes Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, Bach’s St John Passion, Mozart’s Mass in C minor, Haydn’s Creation, Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, along with Britten’s orchestral song cycle Les Illuminations, Vivier’s Lonely Child and Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre.

Katrien Baerts appears in concert with orchestras such as the Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest, the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and Klangforum Wien, and has worked with conductors including Vladimir Jurowski, Oliver Knussen, Reinbert de Leeuw, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Carlo Rizzi and Bas Wiegers.

She gives regular recitals with the pianist Bart Verheyen, which have been broadcast on the radio and on Dutch television.

Katrien Baerts studied at the Dutch National Opera Academy in Amsterdam and participated in international song masterclasses with Udo Reinemann and other visiting professors. She graduated from the Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles with a master’s degree in singing and violin, and was a semi-finalist at the prestigious Queen Elisabeth Competition (singing category) in Belgium.