Biography

The Russian soprano Olga Peretyatko has been a popular and successful figure in the operas of Mozart and in bel canto Italian repertory. She has also sung French and Russian vocal works. Peretyatko was born in Leningrad in the former Soviet Union (now St. Petersburg, Russia), on May 21, 1980. When she was young, she sang in the children's choir of the famed Mariinsky Theatre and shared stages with some of the world's top opera stars. She took up singing seriously as a teen and enrolled at the Hanns Eisler-Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, Germany. Moving on to the Hamburg Opera Studio, Peretyatko also took classes at the Accademia Rossiniana in Rome. That led to a 2006 appearance in Rossini's Il viaggio a Reims at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, Italy. The following year, she scored a major breakthrough with a second prize at Plácido Domingo's Operalia world youth competition, held that year in Paris. That opened doors to an appearance in a new production of Stravinsky's Le Rossignol in Toronto in 2009, a production that was repeated in houses in the U.S., France, and the Netherlands. Peretyatko also sang lead roles in several more Rossini Festival productions. The 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 seasons saw her break through to international prominence with debut appearances at the Vienna State Opera, La Scala in Milan, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, as well as several other major houses. In the summer of 2014, she performed for an audience of 600,000 people at the celebration of Bastille Day in Paris. In 2015 and 2016, she returned to both the Vienna State Opera and the Metropolitan Opera as well as making other major debuts. In 2017, Peretyatko extended her range into French music with an appearance in the 2017 production of Bizet's Les Pêcheurs de perles directed by filmmaker Wim Wenders and conducted by Daniel Barenboim. The 2018-2019 season saw Peretyatko make forays into China and Japan. In 2011, Peretyatko was signed to the Sony Classical label and has released several acclaimed albums there. Her Rossini! (2015) and Russian Light (2017) albums won the ECHO Klassik and OPUS Klassik awards, respectively, from the German recording industry. She appeared with others on the album The Secret Fauré in 2018, and the following year issued the recital album Mozart+. By that time, Peretyatko was sufficiently celebrated that her 2018 divorce from conductor Michele Mariotti merited headlines in the operatic press.