Nicola Beller Carbone
soprano
Nicola Beller Carbone, who will soon be celebrating 30 years on the stage, is no an ordinary operatic performer.
Born in Germany, Beller Carbone grew up in Spain. She is distinguished by a particularly artistic profile, giving equal weight to acting and music. Her experience as a dancer, instrumentalist and actress enrich the manner in which she works out how to portray her operatic figures, making her one of the outstanding and authentic performers on the modern operatic stage.
In her childhood, she danced classical ballet, in her teenage years she gave piano concerts, and after she left school she was a member of street theatre and cabaret ensembles. As well as singing in jazz and rock bands, she was a percussionist, a bass player.
She started her drama training in Zaragoza and later decided to study classical singing at the Escuela Superior de Canto in Madrid. Her first steady engagement took her in 1991 to Germany, where she joined the Operastudio of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. Then she moved to the city’s Gärtnerplatztheater, and after that was offered a permanent engagement at the Nationaltheater in Mannheim. Since 2001 she has worked as a freelance soprano.
Her particular affinity to the 20th-century repertoire emerged at an early stage. Her parts include Katerina Ismailova in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Dimitri Shostakovich, and Marie in Alban Berg’s Wozzeck. Parts in Richard Strauss operas include, alongside Salome, Chrysotemis, Ariadne and the Färberin, and most recently, the difficult role of Elektra; in works by Wagner she has sung Sieglinde (Die Walküre) and Kundry (Parsifal).
Nicola Beller Carbone is now regarded as a specialist for the complex repertoire of the Second Viennese School, as well as for the contemporary repertoire. She is outstanding as a performer of rarely performed operatic literature, e.g. as Countess de la Roche in Die Soldaten by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Ophelia in Die Hamletmaschine by Wolfgang Rihm, Die Frau in Erwartung by Arnold Schoenberg and Trommler in Der Kaiser von Atlantis by Viktor Ullmann. At the same time, though, she is also at home in the classical repertoire, with Medea by Luigi Cherubini, and Tosca by Giacomo Puccini as her major roles.
In 2016 she was nominated best singer in Spanish opera and zarzuela. Her award-winning Pepita Jiménez by Isaac Albéniz in a production by Calixto Bieito has since been revived three times. She has also successfully interpreted well-known zarzuela roles such as Soleá in El Gato Montés by Manuel Penella at Madrid’s Teatro de la Zarzuela, where she has made a name as a confident performer of this Spanish genre.
In the concert field, too, Nicola Beller Carbone is active internationally. She has performed with Michael Gielen and the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra in the Berlin Konzerthaus, with Gianandrea Noseda at the Festival di Stresa and with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Orchestre Metropolitain in Montreal, to name but a few. She's highly individual musical profile is rounded off by lieder recitals with unconventional programmes.
Among those who have exerted a lasting influence are Astrid Varnay, under whom she studied, Richard Trimborn, with whom she studied nearly all her German-speaking parts in sessions strongly characterized by their musical humanism, along with fellow singers Hildegard Behrens and Hedwig Fassbender, stage directors Michael Schulz, Robert Carsen, Nicolas Brieger, Gabriele Rech, Arila Siegert, Paul Curran, Uwe Eric Laufenberg, Hugo de Ana, Emma Dante, Calixto Bieito, Marcelo Lombardero, Sebastian Baumgarten and conductors Stefan Blunier, Michael Gielen, Gian Andrea Noseda, Jeffrey Tate, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and Kirill Petrenko with all of whom she has worked, and all of whom have left their mark on her.
In recent years Nicola Beller Carbone has devoted herself increasingly to teaching, holding regular master classes at acclaimed institutions such as the ‘Theaterakademie August Everding’ in Munich, the Escuela Superior de Canto in Madrid, the Fundación internacional Alfredo Kraus in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, the Opernstudio in Munich, and the Accademia del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino / Opera di Firenze in Florence.
From 2013 to 2018 she was the artistic director of the summer workshop InCanto Tignano – Sing&Act, near Florence. In 2020 she starts a new project as teacher and 'alma mater' of the seminar LiberainCanto, sharing experiences and knowledge with young artists.
Next future Beller Carbone will return to Madrid to perform the main role of the new opera Marie by Germán Alonso, in a coproduction between Teatro Real and Teatro de la Abadía, and will start her career as stage director in Spain.
Website Nicola Beller Carbone