Margarita Gritskova

Biography

Margarita Gritskova was born in Saint Petersburg and studied piano and voice with Irina Bogatscheva at the State Conservatory of her hometown. A formative experience during her studies was her performance as Carmen under the baton of Mariss Jansons. The young singer has won prizes at competitions such as the Luciano Pavarotti Competition in Modena in 2008 and the Concurso Internacional de Canto Villa de Colmenar in Spain in 2009.

After completing her studies, Margarita Gritskova was engaged at the National Theatre in Weimar, where she was able to build the foundation of her large repertoire with roles such as Ottone (The Coronation of Popea), Bradamante, Cherubino and Carmen.

Between 2012 and 2020 she has been a member of the ensemble at the Vienna State Opera. Here she has sung roles such as Cherubino (Le nozze di Figaro), Idamante (Idomeneo), Sesto (La clemenza di Tito), Dorabella (Così fan tutte), Rosina (Il barbiere di Siviglia), Angelina (La Cenerentola), Isabella (L’Italiana in Algeri), Olga (Eugene Onegin), Krista in the new production of The Makropulos Affair staged by Peter Stein, Bradamante (Alcina) or Smeton (Anna Bolena). A very special experience was her role debut as Mascha in the new production of Peter Eötvös opera Tri sestri staged by Yuval Sharon. After that Peter Eötvös dedicated the song Bitterkeit to her, based on a poem by Marina Tsvetaeva. With her performance at the Vienna Opera Ball in February 2014, Margarita Gritskova caught the attention of an even larger international audience thanks to the worldwide television broadcast. In autumn 2016 she sang Cherubino at a guest performance of the Vienna State Opera in Japan under the baton of Riccardo Muti and again in spring 2018 in Aix en Provence under the baton of Alain Altinoglu. In January 2018 she made her role debut as Carmen at the Vienna State Opera, alongside Piotr Beczala as Don José.

Guest appearances have taken her to leading opera houses such as the Bayerische Staatsoper Munich, the Staatsoper Hamburg, the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, the Opera Cologne, the Zurich Opera House, the operas in Oslo and Valencia, the Opéra de Québec and to festivals such as the Salzburg Festival, Festival de Opera in Tenerife, the Rossini Festival in Pesaro and the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival. In 2018 Margarita Gritskova was honored as the best mezzo-soprano of the opera season 2017/18 at the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía in Valencia.

In addition to her role debut as Prince Orlofsky (Die Fledermaus) at the Vienna State Opera, her engagements include Isabella at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and Smeton in Bilbao.

In the summer of 2021, Margarita Gritskova made her role debut as Preziosilla (La forza del destino) at the Klosterneuburg Opera, to critical and audience acclaim, and made her debut as Amneris (Aida) at the Nationaltheater Weimar in the 2021/22 season. After her debut last season as Johanna Seymour (Anna Bolena) at the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz in Munich, she returns to Munich with this role in the current season.

Highlights of her young career include concerts with José Carreras in Vienna, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Innsbruck, Oviedo, Covent Garden in London and Carnegie Hall in New York. Kammersängerin Nelly Lee sparked Margerita Gritskovas’s love for chamber music, to which she has devoted special attention ever since. In 2014 she made her debut with Thomas Lausmann at the piano in a recital at the Vienna Musikverein. Further recitals took her to the Rossini Festival in Bad Wildbad in 2015 with pianist Eduard Kiprsky and to the Rossini Festival in Pesaro in 2017 with young pianist and conductor Ivan Demidov. In 2017 she gave recitals with pianist Maria Prinz in Sofia (Bulgaria) and at the Russian Cultural Centre in Vienna. Based on this program the CD recording “Russian Songs” with works by Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninov was recorded in February 2018 and released by Naxos in March 2019. Two further recordings for Naxos with songs by Prokofiev and Shostakovich were produced in 2019.