Janice Baird is one of today's leading dramatic sopranos. It is above all with the great Wagner and Strauss heroines that the young American has made a splash on the international opera scene. Since the 1999/2000 season she was the Bruennhilde - for which she was nominated Singer of the Year in the leading German opera magazine Opernwelt - in the new production of Die Walküre at the Grand Theatre de Genève, Teatro Bellini di Catania, and in Toulon, she was the Bruennhilde in Loriot's Ring an einem Abend at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, and in Göteborg, sang the Isolde at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires and made her debut as Salome at the Vienna State Opera and the State Opera of Berlin. At the Aalto Opera in Essen she was seen as the Elektra, a role with which she will make her Spanish debut in Sevilla in 2002.

Janice Baird's repertoire also includes the Leonore in Fidelio, which she performed with great success at the Deutsche Oper Berlin and at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in a live TV Broadcast with the MDR Orchestra to celebrate the new Millenium or also Turandot which she will be singing at Opera du Rhin in Strasbourg in 2001/2002.

Janice Baird was born and raised in New York City in a musically influenced family. Her mother was a singer and her father a voice teacher. She studied music: flute, singing and acting in New York City. Carefully developing her rich material from mezzo soprano to soprano roles Miss Baird's first engagements were such opera houses as Darmstadt, Aachen, and Essen, Germany, where she was celebrated as Tosca, Giorgetta/Il Tabarro, Giulietta/Hoffmans Erzählungen, Katya Kabanova, Maddalena/Andrea Chenier, Amelia/Un Ballo in Maschera, Leonore/Forza del Destino, Elisabetta in Don Carlos, Santuzza, Salome and the title role in Korngold's Violanta. Through master classes with Birgit Nilsson and intensive private study with Astrid Varnay with whom she studied all the major Wagner and Strauss roles (Ortrud, Bruennhilde, Isolde, Elektra, Salome) she then added the highly dramatic repertoire on houses such as Kiel, Chemnitz and Wiesbaden, with which she was able to lay the foundation for her international carreer .

Critically acclaimed as a charismatic singer and performer; the pillars of Janice Baird's repertoire are in addition to the dramatic Italian roles (in particular Nabucco/Abigaille, Lady Macbeth, Turandot, Amelia in Un Ballo in Maschera and Tosca) all parts of the German highly dramatic genre from Beethoven (Fidelio/Leonore) to Strauss (Elektra, Salome) and Richard Wagner (all three Bruennhildes & Isolde).

Upcoming projects include among others: a return to the State Opera Berlin in the Harry Kupfer production of Salome, with which she will be making her debuts in Leipzig in December 2001 and in Tokyo Japan in May 2002, and the premieres of the new productions: her debut as Lady Mabeth in Verdi's Macbeth in Mexico City in September 2001, Turandot in Strasbourg in October 2001, Siegfried/Bruennhilde and Götterdämmerung/Bruennhilde in October 2002 and June 2003 in Toulouse, in October 2002 Die Walküre/Brünnhilde in Sevilla, in March 2003 Götterdämmerung/Bruennhilde in Catania, March 2002 Elektra in Sevilla and in Janury 2003 her Elektra in Verona. Her first Solo-CD of excerpts of Wagner & Strauss operas will appear in May 2001 under the label ARTE NOVA in the collection Arte Nova's VOICES.

Contact details and further information

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