About this Artist

Whether she is interpreting Wagner and Verdi as an opera singer or singing Mahler and Schönberg in concert or Lieder recitals, German mezzo-soprano Okka von der Damerau (Brangäne) is renowned not only for her large, warm, and colorful voice, but also for her strong personal expressiveness.

Recent highlights of her career have been Brünnhilde (Die Walküre) and Ortrud (Lohengrin) at the Stuttgart State Opera as well as her Brangäne in a new production of Tristan und Isolde at the Bavarian State Opera under the baton of Kirill Petrenko or her concerts of the Kindertotenlieder by Gustav Mahler with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Daniel Barenboim at the Salzburg Festival.

She sings at major opera houses such as the Munich, Berlin, Stuttgart and Vienna state operas, the Semperoper Dresden, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, La Scala in Milan, Teatro di San Carlo in Naples and the Teatro Real Madrid. She made her debut at the Bayreuth Festival in Frank Castorf’s production of Der Ring des Nibelungen and has been reinvited to the Bayreuth Festival in 2022 and 2023.

Okka von der Damerau has worked with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonic the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic and the Bavarian State Orchestra and worked with conductors such as Kirill Petrenko, Zubin Mehta, Gustavo Dudamel, and Daniel Barenboim.

In the 2022/23 season, she appears as Brünnhilde in Stuttgart and at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, Ariadne (Ariadne auf Naxos) at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich and Ježibaba (Rusalka) at La Scala in Milan.