Biography

Elena Zaremba, making her San Francisco Symphony debut with these concerts, was born in Moscow and studied at the Gnessin Institute of Music. She made her European debut in 1989 at La Scala during a tour with the Bolshoi Theatre, singing the role of Vanja in Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar. The following year Ms. Zaremba made her debut at Covent Garden in Prince Igor, conducted by Bernard Haitink, and she performed with the Bolshoi in Eugene Onegin at the Metropolitan and Washington operas. Ms. Zaremba has appeared at many of the world’s leading venues, including Avery Fisher Hall, the Vienna State Opera, Opéra de Paris, and Academia Santa Cecilia. She sang with Plácido Domingo at his sixtieth birthday celebration at the Met in 2001, and Luciano Pavarotti invited her to a gala in his home city of Modena in 2002 to celebrate his forty years on the stage. In 2004, she performed the title role in Carmen with José Cura to an audience of 35,000 at Seoul’s Jamsil Olympic Stadium. Ms. Zaremba’s repertory includes Ulrica in Un ballo in maschera, Marfa in Khovanshchina, Delilah in Samson et Delilah, Azucena in Il Trovatore, and Fricka in Das Rheingold. Recent engagements included Khovanshchina at Hamburg’s State Opera, Queen of Spades at Barcelona’s Liceu, Eugene Onegin at Berlin’s State Opera, Ruslan and Ludmila at the reopening of the Bolshoi Theatre, and a Russian program at the Cincinnati Festival. Last year in Moscow, she made two new recordings featuring music by Glinka, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, and others.

(October 2012)