Victoria Karkacheva

Victoria Karkacheva comes from the Volgograd region of Russia, and is one of the most outstanding mezzo-sopranos of her generation. In the 2025/26 season she made house debuts at the Vienna State Opera and the Paris Opéra as Bizet’s Carmen, and also sang roles including Venus (Tannhäuser) at the Grand Théâtre de Genève, Nicklausse (Les Contes d’Hoffmann) at the Opéra de Lyon, Marguerite (La Damnation de Faust) at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, Charlotte (Werther) at the Canadian Opera Company and Carmen at the International May Festival of the Wiesbaden State Theatre. In concert she sang Maddalena (Rigoletto) with Le Cercle de l’Harmonie at the Philharmonie de Paris and Judith (Bluebeard’s Castle) with the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne.

Following her Salzburg Festival debut as Dorabella (Così fan tutte), in the 2026/27 season Victoria Karkacheva will make her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York as Neris in Cherubini’s Medea, and return to the Paris Opéra as Sonyetka (Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District), to the Opéra de Lyon as Hanna in Rimsky-Korsakov’s May Night and to the Bavarian State Opera in Munich as Polina (The Queen of Spades). She will also sing Jocasta in performances of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex with the Orquestra Gulbenkian in Lisbon.

Past career highlights have also included Charlotte at La Scala, Milan, Olga (Eugene Onegin) and Judith at the Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona and at the Teatro Real in Madrid, Judith at the Opéra de Lyon and a range of roles at the Bavarian State Opera, including the title role in Fauré’s Pénélope, Polina and Hélène Bezukhova in Prokofiev’s War and Peace. In concert she has appeared as Laura (Iolanta) with the Berlin Philharmonic under Kirill Petrenko, in Beethoven’s Missa solemnis with the Basque National Orchestra in San Sebastián and in Mahler’s Third Symphony with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra.

Victoria Karkacheva won first prize and the Birgit Nilsson Prize at the Operalia competition in 2021 and first prize in the Tenor Viñas Competition in 2020.