Anna Prohaska, Soprano

Raised in Vienna and Berlin, Anna Prohaska is the rising young star of the Berlin Staatsoper Unter den Linden. She’s had guest engagements at the Salzburg Festival in Austria, and in the United States, France and Japan. Now 27, she comes from a musical family. Her father is an opera director from Austria, her mother is an Irish-English opera singer, her brother Daniel is a tenor, her grandfather was a conductor, and her great-grandfather a composer. Anna Prohaska says her parents would have been pleased had she chosen a different profession, but she knew she wanted to be a singer by the time she was 16. She’s lived in Berlin since age 11, where she also studied voice at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music. Daniel Barenboim, conductor and general music director of the Berlin Staatsoper, recruited the soprano to his ensemble while she was still a student and made her his protégé. Her voice and stage presence is reminiscent of Anna Netrebko – unpretentious, relaxed and confident, Anna Prohaska embodies a new kind of opera star who is anything but a diva.