Fredrika Brillembourg opened the Inaugural NY Philharmonic Biennial Festival to universal critical acclaim. The New York Times called her performance as the Narrator in the US Premiere of Toshio Hosokawa’s The Raven with the Gotham Chamber Opera “vocally plush and dramatically courageous,” while the Financial Times described her as “tireless and astonishingly lithe while singing the impossible solos with sensuality when needed and abiding beauty.”
The American mezzo-soprano has appeared at major opera houses including the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, De Nederlandse Opera, the Grand Theatre de Genève, the Opera de Lyon, the Washington National Opera, the Seattle Opera, the Teatro la Fenice, the Teatro Nacional de Sao Carlos, Lisbon and the Frankfurt Opera; as well as at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and at the Bregenz Festival. She has performed with prestigious orchestras such as The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra singing under the baton of among others: Antonio Pappano, Sir Jeffrey Tate, Ingo Metzmacher, Daniel Harding, Kazushi Ono, Mark Albrecht, Manfred Honeck, Kent Nagano and Placido Domingo.
As a member of the ensemble in Bremen from 1995-2001 she sang all the main roles of the mezzo repertoire including: Carmen, Charlotte, Marguerite, Octavian, the Composer, Brangaene, Adalgisa and Orphée. She created the role of Jitsuko Hondo in both the world premiere and Japanese premiere of Toshio Hosokawa's opera Hanjo. Recently she performed at the Komische Oper Berlin (Le Grand Macabre, Hansel and Gretel), the Bergen International Festival (Tan Dun’s Marco Polo), the Cincinnati Opera (Der Rosenkavalier), the Stuttgart Opera (Madama Butterfly, Faust) and the Dresden Semperoper (Rigoletto). In 2017, she made her debuts at the Concertgebouw Amsterdam (Ottorino Respighi’s Il Tramonto), the Deutsche Oper Berlin (Charles Gounod’s Faust) and at the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe (Principessa di Bouillon in Francesco Cileas Adriana Lecouvreur).
Fredrika Brillembourg has collaborated with prominent stage directors such as Christof Loy, Willy Decker, Robert Carson, Barrie Kosky, Stephen Wadsworth, Martin Kusej, Keith Warner, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Jonathan Miller.
On CD Fredrika Brillembourg is featured as: Suzuki (Madama Butterfly, Naxos); in solo arias with the Berlin Symphony, Stravinsky Les Noces, (dir. Sylvain Cambreling), and The Verdi Requiem (dir. Placido Domingo) and on DVD: as Enrichetta di Francia in Bellini’s I Puritani, a Francisco Negrin production from De Nederlandse Opera, conducted by Giuliano Carella. She was the first singer in the history of the Bremen Theater to win both the Kurt Hübner Prize and the Bremen Volksbühne Prize.
In the 2017/18 Season Fredrika Brillembourg returned to the Deutsche Oper Berlin (dir. Jacques Lacombe) and to the Stuttgart Opera (dir. Marc Soustrot) for further performances as Marthe Schwertlein in Gounod’s Faust as well as to the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe to reprise the Principessa di Bouillon in Katharina Thoma’s production of Adriana Lecouvreur (dir. Johannes Willig). She also returned to New York’s Carnegie Hall to sing Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony. In the 2018/19 season she was back at the Komische Oper Berlin to sing The Old Lady in Barrie Kosky’s new production of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide and in a solo evening of Kurt Weill and Leonard Bernstein songs for Broadway called "One touch of Genius". 2019/2020 brings the revival of Kosky’s Candide and Rigoletto at the Komische Oper Berlin and a debut in the 2020 Festspiel Werkstaat at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich singing the role of Chirinos in a new production of Hans Werner Henze’s Das Wundertheater.
This biography is to be reproduced without any changes, omiss ions or additions, unless expressly authorised by the artist management.
