Coloratura soprano
Julia Sitkovetsky has a wide range, performing music from art song to
Mozart's Queen of the Night, in the opera Die Zauberflöte, K. 620. Singing professionally since she was 16, she has accumulated experience in roles of many kinds.
Sitkovetsky was born in London on September 4, 1989. Her father,
Dmitry Sitkovetsky, is a violinist and conductor; her mother,
Susan Roberts, is an opera singer.
Julia has performed with her father, and her mother is among her teachers. She mastered the role of Flora in
Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw and performed the role at the Glyndebourne Festival when she was 16 and again at the English National Opera at 18. She studied music at Queen's College, Oxford, graduating in 2012 with first class honors.
Sitkovetsky attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, studying with
Susan McCulloch, and she has continued vocal studies with
Marie McLaughlin and her mother, among others. She accumulated several major prizes, beginning in 2014 with a win at the Festival Singing Competition; that same year, she was a finalist at the Young Classical Artists Trust competition at London's Wigmore Hall.
In 2016,
Sitkovetsky made her major role debut at the Vaasa Opera in Finland as Mimi in
Puccini's La bohème. The following year, she appeared at the Landestheater Linz in Austria as Gilda in
Verdi's Rigoletto and as Ida in
Hans Werner Henze's Der junge Lord at Germany's Staatsoper Hannover. In the 2018-2019 season,
Sitkovetsky made her debut at the Scottish Opera as the Queen of the Night, which has since become one of her signature roles; she sang it three times at the Semperoper in Dresden and once at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, where she also performed the role of Waldvogel in
Wagner's Siegfried. She has also begun a song recital career, appearing with top accompanist
Roger Vignoles at Wigmore Hall and England's Snape Maltings concert hall. It was with art song that she began her recording career with an album of Rachmaninov songs on the Hyperion label in 2020. In 2021, she moved to Chandos, releasing the album
Where Corals Lie: A Journey through Songs by Sir Edward Elgar, with accompanist
Christopher Glynn. ~ James Manheim