Anna Prohaska

Anna Prohaska was born into a distinguished musical family in Vienna (her great-grandfather was the composer Carl Prohaska and her grandfather the conductor and teacher Felix Prohaska) and studied in Berlin at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music. At the age of 17, she made her debut at the Komische Oper in Harry Kupfer’s production of Britten’s Turn of the Screw and then in Willy Decker’s production of Albert Herring. When she was 23, she took on the role of Frasquita at short notice in a production of Carmen conducted by Daniel Barenboim – her debut at the Berlin Staatsoper – and was promptly engaged as a member of its permanent ensemble. A year later, she made her debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker, with whom she has worked closely, premiering Wolfgang Rihm’s Mnemosyne under Matthias Pintscher in a ceremony for Claudio Abbado. Following her Salzburg Festival debut in Rusalka under Franz Welser-Möst in 2008, she returned in 2009 for Luigi Nono’s Al gran sole carico d’amore and, in 2010, was the soloist in Berg’s Lulu Suite with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra conducted by Abbado in Venezuela and Lucerne. Besides contemporary music and the standard repertoire, Prohaska also devotes herself to early music and has worked with Moderntimes_1800 of Innsbruck, the Akademie für Alte Musik of Berlin, the Academy of Ancient Music, Concentus Musicus Wien with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Concerto Köln. She has given recitals at Hamburg’s Laeiszhalle, London’s Wigmore Hall and Covent Garden, Salzburg Mozarteum, Schubertiade and the Vienna Musikverein, as well as with Maurizio Pollini in Paris and Lucerne, Simon Rattle in the UK, Yannick Nézet-Seguin in Baden-Baden and Philippe Jorden in Paris.