Operatic Career
De Niese made her professional operatic debut at the age of 15 with the Los Angeles Opera. She became the youngest singer ever to participate in the Young Artists Studio at the Metropolitan Opera, where she debuted in 1998 at the age of 19 as Barbarina in a new production of Le nozze di Figaro directed by Jonathan Miller and conducted by James Levine.
She also played Beatrice in Dante’s La Vita Nuova featured in Ridley Scott's Hannibal (2001). She sings Vide Cor Meum written by Patrick Cassidy. She was subsequently asked to perform the title role in the Met's production of Maurice Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges. Other Met roles include Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare (2007), Euridice in Orfeo ed Euridice (2009), and Susanna in the same production of Le Nozze di Figaro in which she sang Barbarina in 1998.
De Niese's still growing career has ranged through early Baroque music (Poppea in L'incoronazione di Poppea), via Handel, Mozart and contemporary opera premieres (RAAFF by Robin de Raaff, 2004, De Nederlandse Opera) at major opera houses around the world, to Broadway (Les Misérables) and film (Hannibal) roles.
She has appeared in productions of a number of Baroque operas on stage and on DVD, including the Les Arts Florissants production of Les Indes galantes by Jean-Philippe Rameau, and as Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare, directed by David McVicar, at Glyndebourne in 2005, 2006 and 2009, and in the same production at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2007.
At the end of 2006, when De Nederlandse Opera staged the three Mozart-Da Ponte operas conducted by Ingo Metzmacher, de Niese sang Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro and Despina in Così fan tutte.
Beginning on 31 December 2011 and continuing through January 2012, de Niese appeared as Ariel in The Enchanted Island, a pastiche opera created by Jeremy Sams for the Metropolitan Opera. The new opera has an original libretto in English, based on Shakespeare's The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream, set to music by George Frideric Handel, Antonio Vivaldi, Henry Purcell and Jean-Philippe Rameau. The performance on January 21 was broadcast worldwide as a MET HD video transmission.
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Famous quotes related to operatic career:
“You have promise, Mlle. Dubois, but you must choose between an operatic career and what is usually called ‘a normal life.’ Though why it is so called is beyond me.”
—Eric Taylor, Leroux, and Arthur Lubin. M. Villeneuve (Frank Puglia)