The French soprano Sarah Aristidou is one of the most innovative artists of her generation. She has swiftly made a name for herself on both the opera stage and the concert platform, and has worked with conductors such as Daniel Barenboim, Pablo Heras-Casado, Klaus Mäkelä, Marc Minkowski, Kent Nagano, Trevor Pinnock, Simon Rattle, François-Xavier Roth and Franz Welser-Möst.
Highlights of the 2025/26 season have included a revival of Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre at the Vienna State Opera, and performances at the George Enescu Festival in Bucharest, the London Festival of Chamber Music and with Les Siècles under Franck Ollu at the Berlin Music Festival. She has sung Berio’s Folksongs with Ensemble intercontemporain in Paris, Max Richter’s Voices with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Unsuk Chin’s Akrostichon-Wortspiel with Ensemble Modern at the Prague Spring International Music Festival. In the 2024/25 season she made her debut at the Zurich Opera House in the world premiere of Beat Furrer’s Das grosse Feuer.
Earlier career highlights included Zerbinetta (Ariadne auf Naxos) in Vienna, Berlin and Frankfurt, Ismene (Mitridate, re di Ponto) in Copenhagen and Malmö, Le Grand Macabre and Hosokawa’s Hanjo at the Bavarian State Opera, Thomas Larcher’s Das Jagdgewehr at the Bregenz Festival and at the Aldeburgh Festival, Hans Abrahamsen’s let me tell you with the Philharmonie Zuidnederland, Matthias Pintscher’s with lilies white with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and the world premiere of Brett Dean’s Ich lausche und ich höre with the Scharoun Ensemble.
In 2021 she made her debut at the Salzburg Festival in Morton Feldman’s Neither, returning in 2024 in Furrer’s Begehren and in 2025 in the Boulez homage À Pierre.
As a specialist in contemporary music, she has performed numerous works composed for her, among them Aribert Reimann’s Cinq Fragments français and Jörg Widmann’s Labyrinth IV.
In 2021 she released her debut album ÆTHER; this was followed in 2024 by Enigma, which won the German Record Critics’ Award. Most recently she has recorded Larcher’s The Living Mountain (ECM) and Max Cooper’s EP Seme.
Sarah Aristidou studied in Berlin and Munich and was a member of the Opera Studio of the Berlin State Opera from 2017 to 2019.
The magazine Opernwelt has nominated her twice as ‘Best Newcomer‘. In 2022 she became the first singer to be awarded the Belmont Prize for contemporary music.
