Biography

Ingeborg Danz, active as both mezzo soprano and contralto, easily moves between the spheres of early music and conventional performance and offers compelling performances in a wide variety of repertory. She is perhaps most noted for her work in the fields of Baroque oratorio and art song. A native of Witten in Germany's industrial Ruhr Valley, she studied at first to be a music teacher. She excelled as a voice student, however, and went on for further study with the famed German contralto Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Danz began her career with appearances as a lieder singer in the mid-'80s, retaining Almut Eckels as accompanist for many years after that. With Helmut Deutsch she released a disc of Brahms songs in 2008. Danz appeared on German operatic stages in the late '80s and has sung major Romantic vocal works such as Berlioz's Les nuits d'été and Mahler's symphonies with top orchestras. Among early music listeners she is familiar as a frequent collaborator with two of the field's most prominent conductors, Philippe Herreweghe and Helmuth Rilling; her work with Rilling has brought her before U.S. audiences frequently as part of the Oregon Bach Festival. Danz's Bach cantata recordings with Herreweghe have featured her in some of the composer's most difficult solo arias, and ClassicsToday.com reviewer David Hurwitz enthused that she "warbles her way through the impossibly florid opening aria of BWV 120 with the same instrumental aplomb as the oboe obbligato." Common to several strands of her career is Bach's Mass in B minor, of which she has given widely praised performances live and on recordings. Danz has frequently been featured as soloist on Rilling's large catalog of Bach recordings for the Haenssler label, and she has followed Herreweghe into late Romantic repertory with a recording of Bruckner's Mass No. 3 in F minor (the "Great"), released in 2008. Her tours have taken her across four continents.