Wiebke Lehmkuhl

The alto Wiebke Lehmkuhl, who was born in Oldenburg in 1983, initially studied flute with Carin Levine and transverse flute with Barthold Kuijken and Laurence Dean. She began her vocal training with Ulla Groenewold, which she continued from 2004 with Hanna Schwarz at the Hamburg Musikhochschule and supplemented with master classes with Klesie Kelly and Ingeborg Danz. Following first guest appearances at the Theater Kiel and the Hamburg and Hanover Staatsoper companies, she took up a permanent engagement at Zurich Opera while still a student. In 2012, she made her debut at the Salzburg Festival in Mozart’s The Magic Flute under the baton of Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Today, Wiebke Lehmkuhl is equally at home in the styles of Johann Sebastian Bach and Richard Wagner and appears all over the world as a concert singer and opera performer. On the stage, Erda from Wagner’s Ring cycle is her signature role; she has performed this part at the Bavarian Staatsoper, the Grand Théâtre de Genève, the Opéra national de Paris, and the Royal Opera House in London. At the Bayreuth Festival she has appeared as Magdalene in Die Meistersinger, Flosshilde in Das Rheingold, and the First Norn in Götterdämmerung. Lehmkuhl also appears regularly in Baroque operas: She made her debut at the National Opera in Amsterdam in Handel’s Jephtha; in January 2024, she will take on the role of Cornelia in Handel’s Giulio Cesare in a new production in Paris. In 2023, Kirill Petrenko and the Berlin Philharmonic engaged her to sing in Mendelssohn’s Elijah and in Mozart’s Coronation Mass at their European concert in Barcelona. Under Riccardo Chailly, she sang in Mahler’s Eighth Symphony at La Scala in Milan last May, and she appeared in Mahler’s Second with Klaus Mäkelä and the Orchestre de Paris in the fall of 2022. Last season, she also performed works by Max Reger with the Munich Philharmonic under the baton of Oksana Lyniv and Nathalie Stutzmann.

July 2023