Catherine Malfitano, Singer, Actor, Director, and Teacher, was born in New York City to a dancer/actress mother and violinist father. Renowned as a unique music theater performer, Ms. Malfitano has appeared at all the world’s leading opera houses including the Metropolitan Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Vienna State Opera, La Scala, the Bavarian State Opera, the Paris Opera, the Royal Opera Covent Garden, Berlin’s Deutsche Opera and State Opera, the Salzburg Festival, Florence’s Teatro Comunale, the San Francisco Opera, the Netherlands Opera, the Los Angeles Opera, the Houston Grand Opera, the Théâtre du Chatelet in Paris, the Grand Théâtre du Genève, Barcelona’s Liceu, the Hamburg State Opera, and Brussels’ Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie. Her Emmy-award winning portrayal of Tosca, broadcast live from the actual Roman settings of the opera, was seen by more than one billion viewers worldwide.
Catherine Malfitano’s stage repertoire of more than seventy roles spans the entirety of operatic history. Her interpretations extend from Monteverdi’s Poppea and Erisbe in Cavalli’s L’Ormindo to Annina in Menotti’s Saint of Bleecker Street; from Gluck’s Euridice to Polly Peachum in Weill’s Three Penny Opera; from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor to Humperdinck’s Gretel; from Marzelline and Leonore in Beethoven’s Fidelio to Poulenc’s Thérèse in Les Mamelles de Tirésias; from Konstanze in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Susanna in Le Nozze di Figaro and both Zerlina and Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni to Cleopatra in Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra; from Fiorilla in Rossini’s Il Turco in Italiato Emilia Marty in Janácek’s Makropulos Case; from the three heroines in Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann to the three heroines in Puccini’s Il Trittico; from Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata and Lady Macbeth to Rose and Anna Maurrant in Weill’s Street Scene; from the title roles in Massenet’s Manonand Thais to Puccini’s Tosca, Cio-Cio-San, Mimì, Liù, and Minnie.
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A champion of twentieth century music, she has sung in the world premieres of Carlisle Floyd’s Bilby’s Doll, Conrad Susa’s Transformations, Thomas Pasatieri’s Washington Square and The Seagull and William Bolcom’s A View from the Bridge, McTeague, A Wedding, and Medusa. She has also sung Berg’s Lulu and Marie in Wozzeck, Schreker’s Der Ferne Klang, Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine and Weill’s Mahagonny and Seven Deadly Sins.
Throughout her career, Ms. Malfitano has worked with the world’s leading conductors including Daniel Barenboim, James Levine, Zubin Mehta, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Christoph von Dohnanyi, Sir Colin Davis, Riccardo Muti, Sir Charles Mackerras, Riccardo Chailly, Giuseppe Sinopoli, Valery Gergiev, Christoph Eschenbach, James Conlon, Neeme Järvi, Sir Andrew Davis, Daniele Gatti, Dennis Russell Davies, Carlo Rizzi, Semyon Bychkov, Donald Runnicles, Simone Young, Michel Plasson and Bruno Bartoletti. Her collaborations with directors Robert Altman, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, Luc Bondy, Nikolaus Lehnhoff, Patrice Chéreau, Elijah Moshinsky, Sir Peter Hall, Peter Zadek, David Pountney, Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, Graham Vick, Götz Friedrich, David and Christopher Alden, John Dexter, Giancarlo del Monaco, Jürgen Flimm, Stein Winge and others have produced many of the most memorable operatic events of our time.
In the summer of 2005 Catherine Malfitano added another facet to her artistic profile with her debut as a stage director. Her critically acclaimed new production of Madama Butterfly was the highlight of the Central City Opera festival season, and marked her return to the theater where she had made her professional singing debut in 1972. The Financial Times praised her production as “thoughtfully conceived, fluently executed, and heavy with ritual,” while Opera News added “Malfitano fashioned aButterfly rich in memorable imagery…she worked successfully with the central couple to delineate credible romance; their sensitive enactment of the love duet fueled genuine erotic heat.” ColoradoDrama.com lauded her innovation, citing her production as “one of the most significant and powerful in memory. Malfitano’s dramatic and bold staging bodes well for her second career as a director.”
Since 2005 she has also directed new productions of La Voix Humaine by Francis Poulenc (in which she also performed the role of Elle) for La Monnaie in Brussels, Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Saint of Bleecker Street, again for Central City Opera, Tosca for Florida Grand Opera, Rigoletto for Washington National Opera, Don Giovanni for San Francisco Opera’s Merola Program, and Lucia di Lammermoor for Central City Opera. In 2010 she made her UK directing debut in London, with a new production of Tosca for English National Opera. Directing engagements in the current season include in a new production ofLucia for the Lyric Opera of Chicago, a revival of Tosca for English National Opera, and a new double-bill production of Zemlinsky’s Eine florentinische Tragödie and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi.
Since 1998 Ms. Malfitano has been teaching privately, giving master classes worldwide as well as her own special course entitled “Revealing the ActorSinger Within.” She joined the Voice Faculty at the Manhattan School of Music in the fall of 2008.
