Sara Mingardo

The alto Sara Mingardo studied with Franco Ghitti at the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory of Music in her native Venice, completing her train-ing at the Accademia Chigiana in
Siena. She began her career in 1987 as the winner of the Concorso Toti dal Monte and made her stage debut the same year as Fidalma in a production of Cimarosa’s Il matrimonio segreto in Avezzano. She subsequently soon began appearing at the leading Italian and European opera companies and at the Salzburg Festival and the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. With her warm, dark timbre and resonant deeper range, Mingardo belongs to the rare species of the true contralto and is considered an ideal performer of the works of Monteverdi, Handel, Gluck, Mozart, Rossini, and Berlioz. A prominent role in her career is reserved for early music, which she frequently performs with ensembles devoted to historically informed performance practice and with such conductors as Rinaldo Alessandrini, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Emmanuelle Haïm, Marc Minkowski, Sir Roger Norrington, Christophe Rousset, and Jordi Savall. She also concertizes with traditional symphony orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, the London and Boston Symphony Orchestras, and the Orchestre National de France. She enjoyed a close partnership with Claudio Abbado, with whom she collaborated on a Pergolesi cycle and also recorded Mozart’s Requiem. In the 2016-17 season she will appear as Ottone in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea at La Scala in Milan and as Disinganno in Handel’s Il trionfo del tempo at the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin; she will also appear at the Teatro Regio in Turin in a new production of Vivaldi’s L’incoronazione di Dario. In 2009 the Italian Music Critics’ Association honored Sara Mingardo with the Premio Abbiati.

LUCERNE FESTIVAL debut singing in Mozart’s Requiem in the opening concert for the 2012 Summer Festival.

August 2016