Eva Mei

The soprano Eva Mei, daughter of a musical family from Fabriano in the Italian region of the Marche, studied voice at the Luigi Cherubini Conservatory in Florence. In 1990 she won the Caterina Cavalieri Prize at the International Mozart Competition in Vienna for her performance of Konstanze in Mozart’s Entführung, shortly thereafter making her debut in the same role at the Vienna Staatsoper. She appeared as Norina in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale at the Bavarian Staatsoper in 1992, and in 1993 she made her debuts at La Scala in Milan (as Amenaide in Rossini’s Tancredi), the Royal Opera House in London (as the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s The Magic Flute), and at the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin (as Violetta Valéry in Verdi’s La traviata). Mei also enjoys a close association with Zurich Opera, where she has performed such roles as Handel’s Alcina, Mozart’s Donna Anna and the Countess in Figaro, Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, Micaëla in Bizet’s Carmen, and Mathilde in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell. In 2012 Mei sang Elisa in a performance of Mozart’s Il re pastore at the Salzburg Festival which was conducted by William Christie; in 2014 she returned to sing in Rossini’s Petite Messe solennelle under the direction of Antonio Pappano. Alice Ford from Verdi’s Falstaff has become a significant part of her repertoire; she will also sing the role in the fall of 2015 at La Scala in Milan. Eva Mei has worked with such conductors as Daniel Barenboim, Colin Davis, Daniele Gatti, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Zubin Mehta, Lorin Maazel, Riccardo Muti, Wolfgang Sawallisch, and Franz Welser-Möst. Along with her work as an opera singer, she performs as a lieder recitalist and serves as a teacher at the Conservatorio Statale di Musica in Turin and as the director of various master classes in Italy and Japan for the training of the next generation of singers.

August 2015