Anna Larsson

The alto Anna Larsson is a native of the village of Vattnäs in the Province of Dalarnas Iän in central Sweden. She graduated from the Adolf Fredrik Academy in Stockholm and began taking private voice lessons at 17, completing her training at the Opera Academy in the Swedish capital. Larsson attained international recognition when Claudio Abbado engaged her for performances of Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1997. Since then she has performed the alto solo parts in the Mahler symphonies around the world, for example in appearances with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics, the Boston and Chicago Symphony Orchestras, and the Vienna Philharmonic. Larsson meanwhile commands a concert repertoire which ranges widely from Monteverdi into the 20th century and which she has performed with such conductors as Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, Gustavo Dudamel, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta, Simon Rattle, and Esa-Pekka Salonen. On the opera stage her signature role is Erda in Wagner’s Ring cycle, a role she has performed at such venues as the Aix-en-Provence Festival, La Scala in Milan, and the Bavarian and Vienna Staatsoper companies. Her repertoire additionally includes Gluck’s Orpheus, Wagner’s Waltraute, Fricka, and Kundry, Saint-Saëns’ Dalila, the Zia Principessa in Puccini’s Suor Angelica, and Geneviève in Debussy’s Pelléas, which she has performed under Simon Rattle at the Salzburg Easter Festival. In 2010 King Carl XVI Gustaf named Anna Larsson a Swedish Court Singer, and in 2011 she opened her own concert house, the Vattnäs Concert Barn, near Mora in central Sweden.

LUCERNE FESTIVAL debut on August 19, 2003 in Mahler’s Second Symphony, conducted by Claudio Abbado, who also conducted the Mahler Third in her most recent appearance, on August 19, 2007.

May 2013