SOPRANO ILEANA TONCA

She has been a permanent soloist at the famous "House on the Ring" since 1999, and has performed and sung over 50 different roles there.

As an audience favorite at the Vienna State Opera, she dazzles in Carmen and in The Seasons

Carmen is a story fraught with misunderstandings: Love is mistaken for desire, an affair is confused with an exclusive relationship, affection becomes confused with possessiveness, and violence is mistaken for passion. But it is Carmen – a woman who loves her independence more than anything else – who pays the highest price in this tangled web. The Seasons are a journey through the year that is a metaphor for life! An elderly Joseph Haydn composed this great secular oratorio about man’s integration into the cycle of nature – music rich in color, splendor, and great rhetorical force, as one reviewer noted on May 2, 1801, after the premiere of The Seasons in Vienna: "At times the melody of the song enraptures, at times it shakes like a forest stream bursting through every dam, the powerful intervention of all the instruments; at times its simplicity and artless expression is what thrills the ear, at times it is the lavish opulence of rapid and bright chords. From beginning to end, one’s emotions are involuntarily swept away by the most touching to the most terrifying, the most naive to the most artificial, the most beautiful to the most sublime." Scenes taken from everyday life are juxtaposed with gripping musical descriptions of nature, engaging melodies are paired with thoughtful reflections on life and its transience, great oratorio scenes are contrasted with popular singspiels, replete with both wit and crude humor.

Tonca performed under the baton of Riccardo Muti at the Vienna Festival as well as the Ravenna Festival, and her performance as Zerlina at the Mozart Festival in Reinsberg was met with enthusiastic acclaim. Her sensitive approach to chamber music and the breadth of her vocal-symphonic repertoire continue to set the tone at music festivals alongside conductors such as Bijan Khaden-Missagh and Fabio Luisi, leading Ileana Tonca to the concert stage time and again. Both during her studies and afterwards, Ileana Tonca was awarded a number of prizes at international competitions, most recently the promotional award at the Vienna State Opera’s Eberhard Waechter Medal Awards Ceremony. Ileana Tonca is a founding member of the International George Enescu Society in Vienna. n