Wallis Giunta

Irish-Canadian mezzo, Wallis Giunta, is the 2018 International Opera Awards “Young Singer of the Year”, and was named in 2018 both “Young Artist of the Year” by The Arts Desk and “Breakthrough Artist in UK Opera” in the What’s On Stage Opera Awards. She has been praised by OPERA NEWS for her “delectably rich, silver-toned mezzo-soprano, with a beautiful sense of line and effortless, rapid runs”, with her performance as Mozart’s Sesto for the Canadian Opera Company celebrated as “a triumph…remarkable in its combination of intelligence and beauty”.

Wallis’s upcoming projects include her debuts with Opéra national de Montpellier as Angelina/La Cenerentola, with the Philharmonia Baroque as Tigrane/Radamisto, with the Melk Baroque Festival as Purcell’s Dido and with The Dallas Opera as Rosina/Il Barbiere di Siviglia. She also returns to Opéra de Lyon as Maria de Buenos Aires and to the BBC Proms Festival in recital with guitarist Sean Shibe. Her 20/21 pandemic season looked quite different than expected, but she was fortunate to have had several performances, including the title role in Maria de Buenos Aires with Opera de Lyon & Les Nuits de Fourvière, and Anna I in Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins in a live-streamed new production for Opera North. She was to have made debuts with the Kyoto Symphony Orchestra & Maestro John Axelrod in Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (POSTPONED), with the London Philharmonic Orchestra & Maestro Vladimir Jurowski in Wagner’s Ring Cycle (POSTPONED), with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (TBA/POSTPONED), with Israeli Opera in Handel’s Alcina (POSTPONED), with the Bochumer Symphoniker in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (CANCELLED), and with the Academy of Ancient Music in J.C. Smith’s Paradise Lost (CANCELLED). She also had planned returns to the Deutsche Oper am Rhein for Alcina (POSTPONED), and to the Edinburgh Festival in Mahler’s Das Klagende Lied (CANCELLED).

Wallis is the grateful recipient of the 2016 Bernard Diamant Prize and several major grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the 2013 Novick Career Advancement Grant, the 2013 Sylva Gelber Music Foundation Career Development Award, and multiple prizes from the George London Foundation. Wallis is a 2013 graduate of both the Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artist Development Program & the Juilliard School’s Artist Diploma in Opera Studies, and a 2011 graduate of the Canadian Opera Company Ensemble Studio. She has also studied at The Glenn Gould School, the Ravinia Festival’s Steans Music Institute, and the International Meistersinger Akademie in Germany, and continues her private studies with Edith Wiens.