Lisa Larsson

Soprano Lisa Larsson is among the most versatile singers on the European scene, with a repertory stretching from the Baroque to contemporary music. For much of her career, she was identified as a Mozart specialist.
Larsson was born Eva Astrid Elisabeth Larsson on February 14, 1967, in Växjö, Sweden. Her younger brother is the actor Henrik Larsson. She trained as a flutist at first, pursuing that instrument to the master’s degree level, but in Basel, Switzerland, she began taking singing lessons and then enrolled at the International Opera Studio of the Zurich Opera. That exposed her to top conductors such as Christoph von Dohnány and Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and perhaps under the latter, she continued to pursue opportunities in historical opera performance as well as mainstream repertory. She made her debut in 1995 with the Zurich Opera and then began to appear widely, singing the role of Papagena at the prestigious La Scala opera house in Milan. Larsson has since appeared with opera companies across Europe, including the Komische Oper Berlin, the Bavarian State Opera, and the Royal Opera House in London. For the first part of her career, she was a noted Mozart specialist; her voice later deepened into the music of Berlioz and Mahler. Larsson has been in demand for operatic appearances at festivals such as the Salzburg Easter Festival and the Glyndebourne Festival Opera, as well as the BBC Proms. She has performed concert works with several of the world’s leading orchestras.
Larsson is a vigorous advocate of contemporary music, having performed in particular, the music of composer Rolf Martinsson more than 100 times. He also provided the orchestration for a concert-length program, “Traumreise,” that Larsson devised, based on the songs of Franz Berwald. Larsson has recorded for Challenge Classics, MDG, and BIS, issuing albums of orchestral songs by Martinsson with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic on BIS in 2018 and 2019. ~ James Manheim