de Niese, Danielle

▪ 2009

born 1980, Melbourne, Australia

 In April 2008 the first solo CD by the Australian-born American soprano Danielle de Niese, Handel Arias (2007), won the Orphée d'Or from the Académie du Disque Lyrique in Paris as the debut recording of the year. It was another in a series of triumphs for the talented young singer, and with her youth and glamourous good looks, as well as her talents as an actress and a dancer, de Niese was hailed as just what opera needed.

      De Niese's father, of Sri Lankan and Dutch ancestry, and her mother, of Sri Lankan and Scottish ancestry, emigrated from Sri Lanka to Australia, where their daughter was born. She studied music as a child, and when she was 10, the family moved to Los Angeles. There she continued studies in music as well as dance, and as a teenager she was the host of a television program that featured young performers, for which she won (1996) an Emmy Award. She made her opera debut in Los Angeles at the age of 15, becoming the third generation in her family to perform professionally. After high school she entered (1997) the Mannes music school in New York City, and the following year she became the youngest person ever to be admitted to the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program of the Metropolitan Opera. When de Niese was only 19, she made her Metropolitan debut as Barbarina in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro; this was quickly followed by appearances there in Maurice Ravel's L'Enfant et les sortilèges. After engagements with other American companies, she made her European debut in 2001, singing in The Netherlands and then in Paris and Naples. It was at the Glyndebourne (Eng.) Festival Opera in 2005, however, when she was called upon at the last minute to sing (and dance) the role of Cleopatra in a new production of George Frideric Handel's Giulio Cesare, that she won international acclaim. (A DVD of the production was released in 2006.) Subsequent engagements in major opera houses and with prominent orchestras in Europe and the U.S. followed. In addition, she made appearances in Les Misérables on Broadway and in the 2001 motion picture Hannibal.

      De Niese's small voice was especially suited to works of the Baroque and Classical periods, and at a time when early music performances had a newfound popularity, she was in great demand. In addition to several works of Handel, she also had success in Jean-Philippe Rameau's Les Indes galantes, Christoph Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, and as Poppea in Claudio Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea, a role that took her back to Glyndebourne in 2008. Other Mozart roles included Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro and Despina in Così fan tutte. Venturing into later periods, de Niese sang the roles of Lauretta in Giacomo Puccini's Gianni Schicchi and Nannetta in Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff, as well as Tytania in Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Robert Rauch

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