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The American soprano and mezzo-soprano, Juliana Gondek, began her musical training on the piano and violin, and starting singing Broadway musicals in middle school. Her first musical career was as a professional violinist while earning Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees in Voice Performance magna cum laude from the University of Southern California. She embarked on her international singing career after winning back-to-back Gold Medals in the Geneva International Competition (1983; unanimous Gold Medal) and the 1984 Barcelona "Francisco Viñas" International Competition, as well as the 1983 Prix Patek Philippe and 1984 "Musical America's Young Artist of the Year".
Juliana Gondek has performed in the world's most celebrated opera houses, concert halls, and festivals throughout an almost 40-year international singing career. She has collaborated with such musical luminaries as Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Rudolf Serkin, James Levine, Carlos Kleiber, and Yehudi Menuhin. She has performed leading operatic roles at the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Seattle Opera, New York City Opera, Dallas Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, San Diego Opera, Florida Grand Opera, Baltimore Opera, Netherlands Opera, Edinburgh Festival, the Göttingen and Halle Handel Festivals, Antibe's Festival de Bel Canto, Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival, and Washington's Kennedy Center, among others.
The extraordinary beauty, versatility, technical mastery, and range of her voice, coupled with a rare intelligence, artistry, and expressiveness, have enabled her to move freely through an astonishing breadth of operatic repertoire. Juliana Gondek has been hailed as one of her generation's finest singing-actors, and for her impassioned portrayals of such varied roles as Ginevra in George Frideric Handel's Ariodante, Vitellia in W.A. Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito, all the heroines in The Tales of Hoffmann and the title roles in Rossini's Bianca e Falliero, Bellini's Beatrice di Tenda, Verdi's Giovanna d'Arco, and Georges Bizet's Carmen. She has twenty additional G.F. Handel roles to her credit, including Alcina, Theodora, Rodelinda, Cleopatra, Zenobia (Radamisto), Gismonda (Ottone), Galatea, Esther, Iphis (Jephtha), Michal (Saul), and Fortuna (Giustino). Other operatic roles include W.A. Mozart heroines Countess Almaviva, Donna Elvira, Fiordiligi, Pamina and 1st Lady, Aspasia in Mitridate, Verdi heroines Gulnara (Il Corsaro) and Marchesa del Poggio (Un Giorno di Regno), Micaela in Carmen, Mimi in La Boheme, Rosalinde in Die Fledermaus, and Pat Nixon (Nixon in China).
Juliana Gondek has been the singer of choice for many of the world's most celebrated contemporary composers. She has created starring roles in several world-premiere operas, among them: Ela in David Carlson's Dreamkeepers with Utah Opera; the triple role of Dianne Feinstein/ Harvey's Mama/Hooker in Stewart Wallace/Michael Korie's Harvey Milk with Houston Grand Opera, the New York City Opera, and San Francisco Opera; the title role in Wallace/Korie's subsequent opera, Hopper's Wife, with Long Beach Opera; Sabina in David Diamond's The Noblest Game with New York City Opera; and Gertrude Stein in the Jonathan Sheffer's setting of Stein's autobiographical novel, Blood on the Dining Room Floor at New York's Guggenheim Museum. Gondek has sung the lead roles in Leonard Bernstein's A Quiet Place, Bright Sheng's The Song of Majnun, Hugo Weisgall's Esther, Ian Krouse's Lorca, Child of the Moon, and Angela Peralta (“the Mexican nightingale”) in Roger Bourland's The Dove and the Nightingale. She has premiered the music of John Corigliano, Paul Chihara, Anthony Davis, Richard Wernick, Morten Lauridson, Stephen Albert, Ricky Ian Gordon, Mark Carlson, Bruce Babcock, and Steven Sacco, among many others.
Juliana Gondek has sung as soloist with well over 100 symphony orchestras worldwide, in works such as Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 4 with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra under conductor Andre Previn; W.A. Mozart's Mass in C Minor and L.v. Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra under Herbert Blomstedt; W.A. Mozart's Exsultate, jubilate with L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and Armin Jordan; G.F. Handel's L'Allegro with Nicholas McGegan and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra; G.F. Handel, Haydn, and W.A. Mozart solo cantatas with Sir Raymond Leppard and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra; Francis Poulenc’s Stabat Mater and Gloria with Robert Shaw and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra; L.v. Beethoven's Symphony No 9 with the Bruckner Orchestra of Linz (Austria); Bright Sheng’s Songs from the Sung Dynasty with the Hong Kong Philharmonic and Seattle Symphony Orchestra; Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder with Polish maestro Jerzy Semkow; Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” with the Minnesota Orchestra and Baltimore Symphony under David Zinman; Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 14 with Gerard Schwarz; Benjamin Britten's Les Illuminations with the Münchener Kammerorchester; G. Mahler's Symphony No. 8 (Soprano I) with Madrid’s Spanish National Radio & Television Orchestra; Felix Mendelssohn's Lobgesang (Symphony No. 2) at Carnegie Hall with the St. Luke's Chamber Orchestra under John Nelson; Kurt Weill’s The Eternal Road with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, and George Crumb’s Lux Æterna with the Pacific Symphony. Having spent most of her career performing soprano repertoire, she now performs mezzo-soprano symphonic, operatic, and song literature, including the alto solos in L.v. Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, J.S. Bach's Mass in B Minor (BWV 232), and Verdi's Requiem.
Some of the world's most celebrated venues and summer festivals have presented Juliana Gondek in art song and chamber music recital: the Grand Theatre Geneve and Geneva Conservatory; Teatro La Fenice; Lucerne's Festival Hall; the Hague in the Netherlands; Berlin's National Library; the Pacific Music Festival and Kitara Concert Hall (Sapporo, Japan); Toronto's Glenn Gould Hall; New York's Carnegie Recital Hall and Merkin Concert Hall; Boston’s Jordan Hall; Yaddo Artist Colony; Los Angeles's Ambassador Auditorium, Getty Museum, and Schoenberg Concert Hall; the Shanghai Conservatory of M; Chicago's Smart Museum of Art; Santa Fe's St. Francis Chapel; and at the Caramoor Festival, the Newport Chamber Music Festival (seven seasons), the Bard Festival, the Bravo! Colorado Festival, the Bach Festival of Winter Park, and the Bowdoin International Festival. Additional important festival engagements have included the Salzburg Osterfestspiel, New York's Lincoln Center Summer Festival, the Göttingen and Halle Handel Festivals in Germany, Vermont's famed Marlboro Festival, England's Aldeburgh Festival, and the Avignon and Antibes Festivals in France. She was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Solo Recitalist Prize for her innovative concert series, "The Art of Polish Song” and has championed Polish song in concerts worldwide.
Juliana Gondek's discography includes W.A. Mozart's The Magic Flute on DGG, Harvey Milk on Teldec, G.F. Handel's operas Ottone, Radamisto (recognized by the International Handel Society as Recording of the Year), Giustino, and Ariodante (winner of the 1996 Gramophone Recording of the Year Award, aka British "Grammy") on Harmonia Mundi, W.A. Mozart's Exsultate, jubiliate on Sonoris, "The Yoav Chamber Ensemble" on Orion (winner of the Yehudi Menuhin Foundation Prize), as well as more recent recordings of Bright Sheng's Songs from the Sung Dynasty with the Hong Kong Philharmonic on Naxos, "The Complete Songs of Karol Szymanowski" with Dutch pianist Reinild Mees on the Dutch label Channel Classics, which won the "Fryderyk" Prize for Best Recording of Polish Music from the Polish Gramophonic Society (Polish "Grammy”), and a set of chamber songs by Bruce Babcock and 18 songs for voice and piano by Roger Bourland, both on the Naxos/Parma label. Television and film appearances include a Live from the Met telecast and DGG videodisc recording of W.A. Mozart's The Magic Flute with the Metropolitan Opera, the BBC documentary The Making of West Side Story on the legendary DGG recording with Leonard Bernstein, a Vancouver Symphony Orchestra trans-Canadian telecast featuring Gondek and Sir Yehudi Menuhin, and European telecasts of several of Gondek's international performances. In 2001, she made her on-screen feature film debut as The Opera Diva in a Masterpiece Theatre film adaptation of Willa Cather's novel The Song of the Lark. Other unique engagements have included her portrayal of Vera Stravinsky for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra alongside stars from the Star Trek: Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine television series; a national tour as soloist in G.F. Handel's L'Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato with the Mark Morris Dance Group; soloist with the American Ballet Theater at the Metropolitan Opera House; and starring in the Broadway smash Kismet with Broadway legends John Reardon, Eddie Bracken, and Patrice Munsel for Baltimore Opera.
Recognized as a highly successful pedagogue, Juliana Gondek is Distinguished Professor of Voice and Opera Voice faculty at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music where she has taught since 1997 and served as Chair of Voice. She has maintained a private voice studio for over 40 years and travels frequently to adjudicate national and international singing competitions, to lecture, and to teach masterclasses at institutions such as the Cherubini Conservatory (Florence), the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts, the Shanghai Conservatory, the Geneva Conservatory, Manhattan School of Music, Teatro Nuovo, the Bel Canto Institute (Florence), Summer Songfest (Los Angeles), the University of Chicago, the USC Thornton School of Music, Pepperdine University, Rice University, University of Miami, Baldwin-Wallace, Butler University, University of Wisconsin, Arizona State University, and the University of California–Berkeley. She has served as consultant to American filmmakers, journalists, and news organizations and is frequently engaged as vocal coach by the producers of “The Voice” and “America’s Got Talent.” Ms. Gondek has been associated more recently with OperaAMERICA’s Professional Singer Training Workshops, with YoungArts and Classical Singer National Competition as adjudicator and master teacher, with Japan's Pacific Music Festival on the Baroque Vocal Academy faculty, as Associate Director of the Hawaii Performing Arts Festival, Director of the Astoria Music Festival Young Artists program, and Founder-Director of NAPA Music Festival. |
