Marianne Beate Kielland will take the place of Christina Bock

The Norwegian mezzo-soprano Marianne Beate Kielland has been described by the journal Gramophone with words like “outstanding”, “sensitive”, and “imaginative” and as having “a voice pure in quality, wide in range and unfalteringly true in intonation”. She is a graduate of the Norwegian Academy of Music, where she studied under Svein Bjørkøy. She began her international career as a member of the opera ensemble at the State Opera in Hannover, and since then she has been appearing regularly and making recordings with leading orchestras and ensembles. The breadth of her concert repertoire ranges from works of the Baroque era to music of the present day, and she has appeared with such conductors as Masaaki Suzuki, Andrew Manze, René Jacobs, and Herbert Blomstedt.

She can also be heard in many operatic roles at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre, Paris’s Opéra Comique, and the Royal Opera in Versailles. She appears regularly singing the lieder repertoire accompanied by the pianist Nils Anders Mortensen. It was with him that she made one of her most famous recordings, the album “Veslemøy Synsk” with music by Olav Anton Thommessen, which was nominated for a Grammy in 2021. She is the artistic director of the Oslo Chamber Music Festival, and she teaches at the Norwegian Academy of Music.