Shira Patchornik

Biography

Israeli soprano Shira Patchornik will make her debut at the National Theatre in 2024 as Thalie and Madness in Rameau's Platée.

Her opera career began at the age of 14, when she sang the role of the Little Vixen in Janáček‘s The Cunning Little Vixen at the Israeli Opera. This was followed by several other roles, such as the Shepherd boy in Puccini‘s Tosca or Bastienne in Mozart‘s Bastien und Bastienne. At the age of seventeen, her first international recognition came when she won the prize for best soloist at the Slovakia Cantat competition in Bratislava. She studied singing in Tel Aviv with Sharon Rostorf-Zamir and in Leipzig with Jeanette Favaro Reuter.

At the age of nineteen, she sang Flora in Britten‘s The Turn of the Screw at the Israeli Opera and later guested at the Kammeroper Theater an der Wien as Countess Bandiera in Salieri's La scuola de‘ gelosi. She has also sung in theatres such as Oper Leipzig and Theater Dessau. Since the 2018/19 season, she has been a member of the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden, where she has appeared as Oscar (Verdi: Un ballo in maschera), Zerlina (Mozart: Don Giovanni), Servilia (Mozart: La clemenza di Tito), Morgana (Handel: Alcina) and Gretel (Humperdinck: Hänsel und Gretel). At Theater Nordhausen she performed Cleopatra (Handel: Giulio Cesare in Egitto), at Theater Heidelberg the role of Valencienne (Lehár: Die lustige Witwe) and at the Bregenzer Festspiele she made her debut as Tatyana (Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin). Her repertoire also includes Orasia (Telemann: Orpheus), Euridice (Monteverdi: Orpheus), Micaela (Bizet: Carmen) and Pamina (Mozart: Die Zauberflöte).

Among the important musical personalities with whom she has collaborated are Konrad Junghänel, Jochen Rieder, David Stern, Patrick Lange, Edith Wiens, Tobias Truniger and many others. Her concert repertoire includes Mozart‘s Requiem and Mass in C major, Poulenc‘s Gloria, Bach‘s Mass in B minor, the cantatas Weihnachtsoratorium, Johannes-Passion and others.

She has won several awards at international competitions, such as the Otto Edelmann Vocal Competition in Vienna in 2018 (Jürgen E. Schmidt Prize), the BMSOM Vocal Competition in Israel in 2016 (2nd prize) and the Kammeroper Schloss Rheinsberg in 2017 (prize winner), where she also won the opportunity to sing the role of Frasquita (Bizet: Carmen) at the festival in the summer of that year.