Challenging conventions and pushing boundaries, singer Emily D’Angelo is a musical force to be reckoned with. With her striking stage presence, vocal authority and expressive artistry, she has taken the opera and concert world by storm in recent years. Her repertoire ranges from Monteverdi to minimalism and beyond, and she is already renowned for championing the works of contemporary composers. Little wonder that on making her US recital debut at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in September 2022, with music from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, she was praised by the New York Times for her “wondrous and powerful” singing, and named “one of the world’s special young singers”.
D’Angelo signed an exclusive agreement with Deutsche Grammophon in May 2021 and her debut album, enargeia, was released in October 2021. The recording featured works by Hildegard of Bingen in new arrangements by leading American composers Missy Mazzoli and Sarah Kirkland Snider, together with original pieces by both Mazzoli and Snider, and two works by Hildur Guðnadóttir. Among other accolades, enargeia won Classical Album Of The Year (Solo Artist) at Canada’s Juno Awards in 2022 and was named Best Concept Album at the Gramophone Awards later the same year (“her mezzo voice has incredible range, depth and power at the lower end combined with crystalline clarity up top, with lovely weight, poise and balance”).
The singer’s second solo DG album, freezing, released digitally on 30 August 2024, presents 17 songs drawn from the folk tradition, art song and beyond. Together with instrumentalists Sophia Muñoz, Bruno Helstroffer and Jonas Niederstadt, D’Angelo performs repertoire ranging from songs by John Dowland and Henry Purcell, via music by Rebecca Clarke, Zoltán Kodály and W.C. Handy, to recent works by Philip Glass, Randy Newman, Jeanine Tesori, Cecilia Livingston, “Adrian Ira” Kramer and US band Ween.
Emily D’Angelo devoted much of her 2022–23 season to the operas of Handel. She made her role debuts as Ruggiero (Alcina) at Covent Garden, Ariodante at the Paris Opéra and Juno (Semele) at the Bayerische Staatsoper. She also sang excerpts from Ariodante at her acclaimed Wigmore Hall debut in London (with The English Concert and Harry Bicket): “It wasn’t simply the seemingly effortless coloratura or the rich timbre of her voice that impressed; it was the emotional identification with Ariodante, in the deep sorrow and heavy bitterness of ‘Scherza infida’ and the arrival of hope in ‘Dopo notte, atra e funesta’” (The Times). By contrast, she gave an equally acclaimed performance of material from enargeia at Berlin Fashion Week, working with designer/artist Esther Perbandt in an immersive mixed-reality event entitled Astro Lab Noir.
Operatic highlights of the 2023–24 season included the creation of the role of Jess, a fighter pilot turned drone operator, in Jeanine Tesori’s new opera, Grounded, at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC; returns to the Paris Opéra as Sesto in Giulio Cesare, Berlin Staatsoper as Cherubino and Bayerische Staatsoper as Idamante; and her house debut at the Vienna Staatsoper as Dorabella. On the concert stage, D’Angelo made her solo recital debut at Carnegie Hall; sang Berg’s Sieben frühe Lieder and an enargeia suite (arranged for voice and orchestra by Jarkko Riihimäki) as Spotlight Artist of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra; and gave her first performance of Alma Mahler’s Sieben Lieder (orchestrated by David and Colin Matthews) with the Orquesta Nacional de España and Anja Bihlmaier at Madrid’s Auditorio Nacional, among other appearances.
D’Angelo stars in the opening production of the 2024–25 season at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, as she returns to the role of Jess in Grounded (September/October 2024). She is among the soloists in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at Carnegie Hall (a benefit performance in aid of the Children and Youth of Ukraine, 23 October) and, later in the year, at the Konzerthaus Berlin (30 & 31 December). D’Angelo will also sing at an Advent Concert at Dresden’s Frauenkirche (30 November) and in Handel’s Messiah in Montreal with the Orchestre Métropolitain and Yannick Nézet-Séguin (9 & 11 December). The New Year will see her latest role debut, as Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier at the Berlin Staatsoper (January/February 2025), after which she goes on to reprise Idamante in Berlin (February/March), and both Donna Elvira and Dorabella at the Vienna Staatsoper (March/April).
Emily D’Angelo was born in Toronto in 1994 to a musical family. Encouraged to sing from an early age by her parents and pianist grandmother, she built a solid foundation for her musicianship as a member of the Toronto Children’s Chorus. She studied cello in secondary school before completing her bachelor’s degree in Music at the University of Toronto, after which she joined the Canadian Opera Company’s Ensemble Studio. In the summers of 2014 and 2015 D’Angelo completed a Fellowship at the Ravinia Steans Institute, where she honed her interpretation of and dedication to recital and concert repertoire.
She became a member of the Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artists Development Program in 2017, and made her debut on the Met stage in 2018. That same year, she made her decisive international breakthrough when she became the first contestant to win all four top prizes at the Operalia competition in the event’s 26-year history. In 2019 D’Angelo became the first vocalist ever to receive the Leonard Bernstein Award from the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival and was chosen by New York’s Lincoln Center as one of its 2020 Emerging Artists.
9/2024