Christine Goerke

The American soprano Christine Goerke comes from New York State. She completed her music studies at the State University of New York at Fredonia, initially with a focus on clarinet, before deciding to become a singer in 1989. She began her career as a member of the Young Artist Program at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, to which she belonged from 1994 to 1997. Her first major role at the Met was Donna Elvira in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. But Goerke soon switched to dramatic soprano and has since been especially successful performing heroines from in the operas of Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner. Credits include engagements at San Francisco and Los Angeles Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera, and Houston Grand Opera in the United States, while in Europe she has appeared at the Royal Opera House in London, the Opéra national de Paris, La Scala in Milan, Deutsche Oper in Berlin, and the Teatro Real in Madrid. Most recently, in the spring of 2019, she sang Brünnhilde in Wagner’s Ring cycle at the Metropolitan Opera; in the 2019-20 season, she will return there as Puccini’s Turandot. She will also make her debut at the Vienna Staatsoper in Strauss’s Elektra and will appear as Brünnhilde in a new production of Götterdämmerung in Chicago. Goerke additionally sings a wide range of concert repertoire, including the Stabat Mater settings by Dvořák, Poulenc, and Szymanowski. She has worked with such conductors as James Levine, Zubin Mehta, Andris Nelsons, Seiji Ozawa, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Christian Thielemann, and Michael Tilson Thomas. Christine Goerke won the Richard Tucker Award and has garnered the Grammy Award twice. She was named Vocalist of the Year in 2015 by Musical America and received the 2017 Opera News Award.

July 2019