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The American soprano, Margaret Chalker, comes from an American family of musicians. She first studied flute and piano, originally intending to be a teacher, until her voice was discovered. She obtained her Bachelor of Music Education degree from Baldwin Wallace College, Ohio, (Studio of Sophie Ginn-Paster) studied six months in Italy, returned and taught intermediate and high school music for a year in the Seneca Falls school district before receiving a Graduate Teaching Assistantship to Syracuse University to study with Helen Boatwright. She obtained her Master of Music degree in Music Performance from Syracuse University in 1979.
At the Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio Margaret Chalker sang her first role as the Countess in W.A. Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, followed by a career that took her to many concert halls and opera houses in the USA. In 1984 she performed at the Baldwin-Wallace College Bach Festival. Her career in Europe began in 1985 at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf. In 1987 she made her debut at the Zürich Opera as Jemmy in a new production of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell. Since then she has appeared in more than twenty roles in over four hundred performances of works by W.A. Mozart, Puccini, Strauss, Wagner, Menotti and others. In 1991-1992 she sang Fiordiligi and Donna Anna, and in 1995 sang her first Donna Elvira. She has appeared as a guest artist at the State Theatres in Meiningen, Leipzig, Zürich, Dresden and Prague, with her debut in 1998 at the Hannover State Theatre. She has worked with distinguished conductors and in contemporary music has sung Luigi Dallapiccola’s Concerto per la notte di Natale dell’anno 1956 with Zürich Opera and Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire with the Opera Nova Ensemble. |
