Angela Brown

The American soprano appears this season as a soloist in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with the National Chorale at Lincoln Center and reprises the role she created in Charlie Parker’s YARDBIRD with English National Opera in London. She previously triumphed in another highly successful world premiere, portraying Cilla/Richard Danielpour’s Margaret Garner at Michigan Opera Theatre in Detroit. Brown subsequently repeated the role at Opera Philadelphia and Cincinnati Opera. Danielpour later set the poetry of Maya Angelou for Brown in an orchestral song cycle, A Woman’s Life, recorded in 2012 with the Nashville Symphony. The soprano came to prominence as Aida at the Metropolitan Opera, a portrayal reprised at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Opera Pacific, Bilbao’s Opera de la ABAO, Cape Town Opera, the Hamburg State Opera, and Milwaukee’s Florentine Opera. Other Verdi credits include Amelia/Un ballo in maschera (Paris, Philadelphia), Leonora/La forza del destino and Elisabetta/Don Carlo (both in Cincinnati, the latter also in Philadelphia), Leonora/Il trovatore (Atlanta), and the Requiem (Barcelona, Madrid). A noted interpreter of African-American spirituals, Brown can be heard on several acclaimed CDs, including the newly-released, Grammy-nominated recording of “Ask Your Mama,” composer Laura Karpman’s setting of Langston Hughes’s poem of the same title.

Lyric debut: Addie Parker/ Charlie Parker's Yardbird (2016|17)

Last updated: March 24, 2017