Soprano Inga Kalna was born in Riga. Studied voice and musicology at the Music Academy of her native Riga, Latvia, and made her debut as Pamina in Die Zauberflöte. Then she became a soloist of the Latvian National Opera, where she subsequently was heard as Puccini’s Mimì and Liu, Verdi’s Gilda and Violetta, Donizetti’s Lucia, and Handel’s Alcina, twice winning the Latvian Theater Award and the Great Music Award of Latvia three times. Singing teachers: Ludmila Brown (Riga, Vancouver), Irina Gavrilovici (Vienna), Joy Mammen (London).
Although already an experienced singer, she decided to continue her education in 1997 at London’s Royal Academy of Music (a winner of The Goldberg Operatic Prize – UK, 1997, Bruce Millar-Gulliver Memorial Trust Award – UK, 1999, DipRAM) and two years later became a member of the International Opera Studio of the Hamburg Staatsoper.
Since 2001 she has been a member of the parent company, appearing as Olympia and Antonia in Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Adina in L’elisir d’amore, Xenia in Boris Godunov, and Violetta in La traviata, to name a few. During the recently concluded Hamburg season she was Donna Fiorilla (Il turco in Italia), Regina (Mathis der Maler), and Ilia in Idomeneo.
Guest appearances have brought her to the Dresden Music Festival, the Innsbruck Early Music Festival, the Netherlands Opera, and Flemish Opera, the Munich Festival, the Salzburg Festival. She frequently appears under the baton of René Jacobs, most recently in Handel’s Rinaldo and Francesco Conti’s Don Chisciotte in Sierra Morena.
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