Margaret Chalker

The soprano Margaret Chalker comes from an American family of musicians. She first studied flute and piano, originally intending to be a teacher, until her voice was discovered. At the Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio she sang her first role as the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro, followed by a career that took her to many concert halls and opera houses in the United States. Her career in Europe began in 1985 at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf. In 1987 she made her début at the Zurich Opera as Jemmy in a new production of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell. Since then she has appeared in more than twenty rôles in over four hundred performances of works by Mozart, Puccini, Strauss, Wagner, Menotti and others. In 1991/92 she sang Fiordiligi and Donna Anna, and in 1995 sang her first Donna Elvira. She has appeared as a guest artist at the State Theatres in Meiningen, Leipzig, Zurich, Dresden and Prague, with her début in 1998 at the Hanover State Theatre. She has worked with distinguished conductors and in contemporary music has sung Dallapiccola’s Concerto per la notte di Natale dell’anno 1956 with Zurich Opera and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire with the Opera Nova Ensemble.