Soprano Liv Redpath, in Her Festival Debut, Kicks off Our 52nd Season

Next summer, the first sounds of our 52nd season are filled with the exquisite stylings of soprano Liv Redpath, who, on our season-opening concerts of July 13 & 14, makes her Festival debut singing Schubert’s gorgeous The Shepherd on the Rock—a roughly 12-minute work the composer wrote (one month before his death, at age 31) following a request from opera star Anna Milder-Hauptmann for a virtuosic concert piece that showcased her vocal and emotional range.

Over the past few years, Redpath—who grew up in Minneapolis and graduated from both Harvard and Juilliard—has forged her own international path to opera and concert-stage stardom, with the Berliner Umschau praising her “radiant voice” and hailing it as “effortless, even in the highest register, with breathtaking coloratura, the likes of which have not been heard for a long time.”

Redpath performs The Shepherd on the Rock with four-time Grammy Award–winning clarinetist Todd Levy—a longtime Festival favorite and principal clarinetist for both the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and Santa Fe Opera Orchestra—and pianist George Fu, who’s been called “one of the most exciting young pianists of our time” by The Arts Desk and who recently won BBC Music Magazine’s 2024 Newcomer Award for his debut album, Mirrors.

Redpath and Fu (who also makes his Festival debut next summer) pair up again on July 16 for a recital on the Festival’s Wednesday Noon Series, which Artistic Director Marc Neikrug launched in 2019 to showcase what he described as “the iconic song cycles and individual gems of the art-song repertoire.” The powerful yet intimate program Redpath and Fu perform includes additional songs by Schubert as well as works by such late-Romantic masters as Wolf, Grieg, and Debussy, plus a 1948 song by Richard Strauss called “Malven,” which, in a thrilling turn of events, was discovered in 1984 among the belongings of soprano Maria Jeritza, the song’s dedicatee.

Other highlights of the in-demand soprano’s 2024–25 season include debuts with the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, where she sings the role of Agnès in George Benjamin’s opera Written on Skin, conducted by the composer, and Opera Omaha, where she appears as Anne Trulove in Stravinky’s The Rake’s Progress. Redpath—whose previous engagements have included The Metropolitan Opera, London’s Royal Opera House, and the Komische Oper Berlin, among many others—also performs with the Los Angeles Master Chorale in the US premiere of Rufus Wainwright’s Dream Requiem, and she makes return appearances at the Bayerische Staatsoper (in her signature role of Sophie in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier) and Brussels’s La Monnaie/De Munt (in the role of the Woodbird in Wagner’s Siegfried and in recital). Her orchestral engagements include the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France; the Danish, San Francisco, and Seattle symphony orchestras; the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra; Les Violons du Roy; and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Carnegie Hall. Closer to home (for Festival audiences), Redpath returns to the Santa Fe Opera to sing the role of Susanna in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro.