Dorothee Mields

Soprano Dorothee Mields has emerged as a leading figure in the performance of both Baroque and contemporary music. She was praised by Forbes as “unflappable at any tempo.” Mields was born in Gelsenkirchen, in the industrial Ruhr valley, on April 15, 1971. Her training was German: at the University of Bremen with Harry van der Kamp and later independently in Stuttgart, where her teacher was Julia Hamari, and she continued to study with Richetta Manager during her active career. In the early 2000s, her performing and recording career began to develop rapidly. She has been especially visible at Baroque festivals, including the Bachwoche Ansbach, the Boston Early Music Festival in the U.S., and the Flanders Festival in Bruges, Belgium. She also has a distinguished record in contemporary music; her debut at the Salzburg Festival came in 2007 in the Quatre Chants of Gérard Grisey. Mields’ recordings have been devoted mostly to Baroque music. She made her debut on CPO with a 2002 release of chamber cantatas by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel, followed two years later by a second volume of those and by a recording of the rare Gellert Oden of C.P.E. Bach. After a four-year hiatus, she began recording for the Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, Accent, and Carus, as well as continuing with CPO. For Accent, she released O woe! O woe! My canary is dead!, a collection of secular cantatas by Telemann. She has made thematic recordings, delved into other little-known composers, ventured forward to the Classical period with Boccherini's Stabat Mater, and even beyond with an album of Chopin songs sung in Polish. (She has also recorded Purcell in English.) In 2018, Mields released Lass Mein Herz, an album of cantatas by Christoph Graupner, on Accent. Mields has often appeared in innovative chamber music projects such as Lord Nelson at the River Nile (including music by various composers dealing with that military figure) and White as Lilies Was Her Face, setting texts by Heinrich Heine to music by John Dowland. She has performed contemporary music by Grisey, Pierre Boulez, and many others. She remained active through the COVID-19 pandemic, releasing albums devoted to Telemann on the Accent and CPO labels. In 2023, she was featured on the Audite album On Byrd's Wings: William Byrd and His Circle, returning in 2024 on Brilliant Classics with J.S. Bach & D. Shostakovich: Salvation, accompanied by the G.A.P. Ensemble. Mields has taught at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague and the Franz Liszt Conservatory in Weimar. ~ James Manheim