Delores Ziegler

Website:
www.newenglandconservatory.edu/faculty/ZieglerD.ht
ml

Georgia native, mezzo-soprano Delores Ziegler enjoys an international performing career that ranges from bel canto to verismo opera, recital, concert and music theatre performances. Ziegler has sung in most of the great opera houses of the world, from the Vienna Staatsoper to La Scala Milan, the Bolshoi in Moscow, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Particularly admired for her Dorabella, she has also sung Octavian, Cherubino, the Composer, Orfeo, Romeo in I Capuletti e i Montecchi, Adalgisa, Idamante, and Meg Page.

With a discography of twenty-three CDs and four DVDs, Ziegler is the world’s most recorded Dorabella: she appears on three Cosi fan tutte discs with conductor Bernard Haitink on EMI, Riccardo Muti on Sony Classical, and Nicholas Harnoncourt on Teldec. She sang frequently with the late Robert Shaw and the Atlanta Symphony, recording with them in Mozart's Requiem and Great Mass, and Mahler's Symphony No. 8. She also sang in Mozart's Coronation Mass recorded by James Levine and the Berlin Philharmonic on Deutsche Grammophon. As a lieder singer, Ziegler has appeared in Paris, Florence, Vienna, Cologne and Bonn. She made her New York recital debut in Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall Series in 1992. In 1998, she took part in the world premiere of Ned Rorem’s song cycle, Evidence of Things Not Seen, at Weill Recital Hall under the auspices of the New York Festival of Song. She also recorded that work on CD. The mezzo’s 2000 performance of Kurt Weill’s Lady in the Dark, with the Boston Academy of Music, was cited by Boston Phoenix critic Lloyd Schwartz as one of the best performances of the year. Schwartz wrote: “This daring pre-war (1940), pre-Sondheim story of love and psychoanalysis has one of Weill’s best American scores (it was Boston’s outstanding contribution to the Weill centennial). And American mezzo-soprano Delores Ziegler, who has spent most of her career in European opera houses, proved a great leading lady in the best Broadway tradition-making the part her own by not imitating its inimitable original star, Gertrude Lawrence.”