Nicole Chevalier

After making her Salzburg Festival debut as Mozart’s Elettra this summer, American soprano Nicole Chevalier has a busy schedule in 2019/20 that includes Olympia, Antonia, Giulietta and Stella (Les Contes d’Hoffmann) at the Monnaie in Brussels, Vitellia (La clemenza di Tito) and the title role in Beethoven’s Leonore at the Theater an der Wien and Despina (Così fan tutte) at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. Plans for 2020/21 include her return to the Theater an der Wien and her debut at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

Nicole Chevalier’s most recent roles at the Komische Oper in Berlin have been the title role in Handel’s Semele and Cunegonde (Candide), both in productions by Barrie Kosky, with whom she has worked on numerous roles during her five years with the company. These include the four female leads in Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Pamina (Die Zauberflöte), Télaïre (Castor et Pollux), the title role in La Belle Hélène and Gilda (Rigoletto). Other roles for the company include Donna Elvira (Don Giovanni), Fiordiligi (Così fan tutte), Tytania (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Rosalinde (Die Fledermaus) and, above all, the title role in Aribert Reimann’s Medea in a production by Benedict Andrews.

A dramatic coloratura soprano, Nicole Chevalier has a wide-ranging repertoire extending from the Baroque to the music of contemporary composers such as Reimann, Kaija Saariaho and Dmitri Kourliandski but with a particular focus on the great soprano roles of Mozart, Donizetti and Verdi. Highlights of her career have included Verdi’s Violetta (La traviata) in both Benedikt von Peter’s staging at the Hanover State Opera and Ruth Berghaus’s production at the Stuttgart State Opera, Donizetti’s Lucia at the Hamburg and Hanover State Operas, Mozart’s Konstanze at the Vienna Volksoper and in Calixto Bieito’s production at the Komische Oper and Elettra at Opera Vlaanderen in Antwerp and Ghent, where she triumphed in March 2019 as Eudoxie in Peter Konwitschny’s production of La Juive.

For her performances as the four female leads in Les Contes d’Hoffmann in Berlin Nicole Chevalier received the German Theatre Prize Der Faust in 2016. In 2017 her portrayal of Reimann’s Medea was repeatedly nominated for the award of Singer of the Year in the poll of critics for Opernwelt magazine. She was also the subject of a profile in Opernwelt’s annual yearbook.