Swedish soprano Julia Sporsén is known for the intensity with which she portrays her characters. Her performances have been described as “fiery” (Opera Magazine), “searing” (The Sunday Times), and “almost unbearably moving” (The Spectator), and she is praised for her virtuosic and expressive singing as well as her stage presence and captivating acting skills. She is the 2023 winner of the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet's Opera Prize for her bold portrayal in the title role of Norma at Folkoperan Stockholm. She performed Berlioz’s ‘Le spectre de la rose’ and Lehar’s ‘Meine lippen, sie küssen so heiss’ at the 2023 Nobel Prize Ceremony in Stockholm.
Recent highlights include a return to Scottish Opera as Pat Nixon Nixon in China, Elsalill Herr Arnes Penningar at Göteborg Opera, Paulina Salas Death and the Maiden at Malmö Opera, Ingeborg in Elfrida Andrés opera Fritiofs saga, Waltraute Die Walküre at Gothenburg Opera, returns to Folkoperan in Stockholm for Isolde Tristan and Isolde, the title role in Norma and Judith Bluebeard's Castle, and sang a new work by Maria Lithell Flyg at the Västerås Konserthus, and a programme of Rangström, Stenhammar and Sibelius with the BBC Concert Orchestra.
This season sings the title role in Iolanta, Desdemona Otello, and a series of summer concerts at Gothenburg Opera.
Notable concert engagements include appearances with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Manchester Camerata, London Mozart Players, RUSK Chamber Music, Göteborg Symfoniker and Göteborg Wind Orchestra. She has given recitals at London’s Wigmore Hall and the Royal Opera House Covent Garden with Joseph Middleton and has also toured with a one-woman show “Dreamlives” for the Liederkreis company: a staged performance of lieder by R. Strauss, Berg and Schönberg, with performances around the United Kingdom including the Leeds Lieder Festival. In 2021/22, she took up the position of Artist in Residence at Kulturhuset Spira in Jönköping.
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CD: Swedish Songs & Operatic Scenes, dB Productions
(October 2024)
Last, and perhaps best: Julia Sporsén in a couple of great arias from Gosta Nystroem's Herr Arnes penninger with fabulously evocative playing from the orchestra of the Gothenburg Opera.
Camilla Lundberg, OPUS magazine
[The disc] culminates in two arias from Gosta Nystroem's earlier setting of Herr Arne's penningar, softly and sweetly conveyed by the super-sporano Julia Sporsén as Elsalill in a frozen Marstrand.
Johanna Paulsson, Dagens Nyheter
Verdi Otello (Desdemona)
Göteborgs Operan (November 2024)
This exceptionally intelligent, confident, warm, musical soprano and stage personality has become a kind of plumb line among Swedish opera singers. Sporsén moves confidently through the music. From the most sublime pianissimos to softly swelling fortes. Always with a clear intention.
Gunilla Brodrej, Expressen
Julia Sporsén is brilliant… She goes from strength to strength, this Gothenburg soprano star who shines so brightly and touchingly.
SVT Nyheter
The soprano Julia Sporsén and the baritone Jens Søndergaard make fantastic contributions as Desdemona and Iago, and not least the long scene in the closing act is given a moving character, when Sporsén sings the song of the vine and with the toned-down refrain of grief captures the vulnerability in the face of the coming violence.
Magnus Haglund, Göteborgs-Posten
Julia Sporsén, who is completely alone in her final scene, evokes the most unimaginable in Desdemona. Not the damaged one, but the undamaged one. The healing movement of the unbroken melodic lines.
Martin Nyström, Dagens Nyheter
It is also Julia Sporsén – SvD’s opera laureate 2023 – who truly holds the production with her complete presence and dramatic nerve… Julia Sporsén as the sacrificed Desdemona carries the production in Gothenburg.
Magnus Bunnskog, Svenska Dagbladet
Jonas Forssell Death and the Maiden (Paulina Salas)
Malmö Opera (May 2024)
It is a formidable trio of singing actors who spin the drama in "Death and the Maiden", with Julia Sporsén's chain-smoking Paulina at the center. After her previous triumphs with Norma and Judit at Folkoperan, Sporsén portrays yet another female rebellion, where her voice vibrates with anger and her body signals desperate determination. Few can bite the head off a violently speculative portrayal of women better than her, which Dorfman's story is to some extent.
Sofia Nyblom, Dagens Nyheter
Something wonderful happens when the singing trio Julia Sporsén, Dimitris Paksoglou and Fredrik Zetterström portray the drama about abuse and truth in the shadow of the dictatorship… Her aria in the first act transposed to Schubert's music, as well as the testimony aria in the second act, are astonishingly moving. The final scene where she reconquers the Schubert, with a drink and a cigarette in quiet solitary euphoria with the whole orchestra behind her, is among the most beautiful I have seen. Quite simply, a triumph.
Loretto Villalobos, Svenska Dagbladet
Paulina is a big part, demanding both scenically and vocally. But Julia Sporsén has everything the role requires. Her performance is a master test, non-stop fascinating to follow. When you think she has no more to give, the voice opens up to even more sparkling spaces. Actually, Julia Sporsén is something of a one-of-a-kind on a Swedish opera scene.
Gunilla Brodrej, Expressen.se
It is rare to understand the text when an upset soprano sings, but here there is no problem understanding every word from Julia Sporsén without looking at the typewriter… Julia Sporsén plays the main role with shaking intensity
Lennart Bromander, Aftonbladet
Sibelius, Rangström & Stenhammar, BBC Concert Orchestra
Queen Elizabeth Hall (March 2024)
The Swedish soprano Julia Sporsen — sporting a different dress for each half — never let the embers die down even between these neglected Nordic lieder, singing with a tightly spun intensity that suited these fervent torch songs and midnight meditations.
Daniel Lewis, The Times****
Written in quick succession at the beginning of a love affair in 1924, Rangström’s two short songs constituting The Dark Flower are delicate and personal – and Sporsén treated them as such… her voice has a deeply expressive quality and she displayed economical vocal control. In The Wind and the Tree she handled the shifts from dark to light and minor to major with melancholic refinement. In the beautiful, hymnlike Prayer to the Night she showed intensity. Sporsén imbued the following – equally short – Stenhammer pieces radiantly: Fylgia was sung with grace and clarity; Starry Eye yearning and pleading, her consonants crisp, her voice lyrical.
Sporsen performed each with energy, tragedy and occasional bitterness.
Susannah Moody, Bachtrack****
Chausson Poeme de l'amour et de la mer, Jönköpings Sinfonietta
Kulturhuset Spira (February 2023)
“Poeme de l'amour et de la mer", a shimmeringly beautiful work consisting of two longer movements of song and a short instrumental interlude. The piece seems written for a singer like Julia who is in command of her singing and knows how to use simple means to create dramatic nerve in the performance (which is completely free from the staged approach from last season).
Rikard Flyckt, Jönköpings-Posten
Bellini Norma (Title role)
Folkoperan Stockholm (September 2022)
It is one of those shows about which you will say afterwards: I was there. "I was there when Julia Sporsén did "Norma" at Folkoperan"… Julia Sporsén and Ann-Kristin Jones' duets are so insanely expressive and emotional together… something that many will call her definitive breakthrough on a Swedish opera stage… Every fiber of her body convinces. To dwell on her being a dramatic coloratura would be pointless. Sporsén is past show singing. She means what she sings. It's like she just opens her mouth and the music is there. You forget that it is difficult. Of course, it is terribly difficult. But she just is. Norma. And I was there.
Gunilla Brodrej, Expressen
The fairy-tale soprano Julia Sporsén is an obvious center of power in the title role with the aria "Casta diva", where Norma asks the moon goddess for peace. The design comes superbly close to her anguish, how she is torn between being left by partner and mother, scorned yet despairing - not to say completely furious… with beautiful duets between…Adalgisa and the deceived Norma, where Jones and Sporsén swarm together in the name of sisterhood.
Johanna Paulsson, Dagens Nyheter
Julia Sporsén as Norma has a forlorn presence with graceful coloratura. The "Casta diva" aria - in Tuvalisa Rangström's translation "Chaste moon" - becomes a test of strength embedded in melancholy. With the raised orchestra and Ellen Ruge's lights, it becomes like a synesthetic effect where the music is the silvering moonlight.
Loretto Villalobos, Svenska Dagbladet
Stubø and set designer Magdalena Åberg have created a stage space and a direction that allows the two female leads Ann-Kristin Jones and Julia Sporsén to shine as Bellini's lyrical music turns into both a dirty Norén drama and a timeless tragedy that makes you forget the sometimes mannered nature of opera conventions. Musical drama at its best.
Björn Wiman, Dagens Nyheter
Tebogo Monnakgotlas Den försvunna, Kulturhuset Spira
Jönköping Sinfonietta, (May 2022)
The movements are also composed both for and in close collaboration with the soloist Julia Sporsén - a soprano who goes from clarity to clarity and who in parallel is an artist in residence here. As such, she has also had the opportunity, together with Kulturhuset Spira's artistic team, to explore how to deepen the classical concert format on stage.
… Sporsén is at the same time a brave and modern soprano. With her mobility and superb voice control, she breathed new life into an ancient repertoire. Under the heading "The girl in the forest", she brought together songs by Ture Rangström and music by the 150th anniversary Hugo Alfvén into an imaginatively choreographed "song ballet". With astonishment and some obsession, she approached nationally romantic music by two mildly German-friendly composers, safely passed to the world of fairy tales in John Bauer's country itself under the sympathetic guidance of Australian conductor Matthew Wood.
Johanna Paulsson, Dagens Nyheter
Gösta Nystroem Herr Arnes Penningar (Elsalill)
Gothenburg Opera (February 2022)
Among the singers, it is the foster sisters couple Julia Sporsén and Sofie Asplund who shine through; both brilliant.
Camilla Lundberg, SVT Kulturnyheterna
Soprano Julia Sporsén’s voice is both convincing and impressive, because the music with its varying whims seems difficult to sing, to say the least. Particularly strong is her aria in the beginning of the second act, when the dead foster sister reappears to force Elsalill to exact revenge for the murders and reveal the culprits.
Britt Nordberg, alba.nu
Sporsén convinces with elegiac intensity in her soprano.
Lennart Bromander, Aftonbladet
[Sporsén] shines like a storm lantern in the dark
Martin Nyström, Dagens Nyheter
At the center of the drama is the close relationship between the girl Elsalill and her foster sister, very impressively portrayed by the two sopranos Julia Sporsén and Sofie Asplund.
Magnus Haglund, Göteborgs-Posten
Julia Sporsén has impressed as both Isolde and Violetta, and here she makes her next big tragic role interesting with sincerity and depth.
Gunilla Brodrej, Expressen
There are absolutely wonderful singing contributions, not least from Julia Sporsén as Elsalill and Sofie Asplund as her (nameless) foster sister: two clear sopranos - one tougher, darker, more dangerous and one that is shimmering, spooky light.
Bo Löfvendahl, Svenska Dagbladet
Julia Sporsén as Elsalill, the only one who survives the atrocities of the Scottish mercenaries in Solberga vicarage, is well cut out for the role with her lyrically-dramatic soprano.
Sören Tranberg, Tidskriften Opera
Tebogo Monnakgotlas Den försvunna and Schubert Lieder, Jönköping Sinfonietta
Kulturhuset Spira (February 2022)
It is brilliant and moving, and Sporsén finds an exact expression in both singing and acting… "Erlkönig" will be a pure dramatic highlight this evening.
Richard Flyckt, Jönköpings-posten
Ravel's Sheherazade & Ariadne arias, Jönköping Sinfonietta
Kulturhuset Spira (November 2021)
Julia Sporsén as artist in residence is a stroke of luck. She is an absolutely brilliant soprano who is able to take charge of the music regardless of whether it is dramatic with Strauss or painfully beautiful and delicate with Ravel. The main piece of the evening, despite the short playing time, is of course the Monnakgotla / Karam collaboration. This time Julia Sporsén sings from a child's perspective. It is an incredibly beautiful text, both painful and hopeful.
Richard Flyckt, Jönköpings-posten
Julia Sporsén’s Opera Repertoire
| John Adams | A Flowering Tree (Kumudha) |
|---|---|
| Julian Anderson | The Thebans (Antigone) |
| Bizet | Carmen (Micaela) |
| Britten | Peter Grimes (Ellen Orford) extracts |
| Cilea | Adriana Lecouvreur (title role) extracts |
| Donizetti | L’Elisir d’Amore (Adina, Giannetta) |
| Detlev Glanert | Caligula (Livia) |
| Alexander Goehr | Promised End (Regan) |
| Handel | Rinaldo (Armida) extracts |
| Janáček | Jenufa (Jenufa, Jano) |
| Martinů | Julietta (Julietta) |
| Menotti | The Consul (Magda) extracts |
| Mozart | La clemenza di Tito (Vitellia) extracts |
| Poulenc | La voix humaine (Elle) |
| Puccini | La bohème (Mimì, Musetta) |
| Rameau | Dardanus (Iphise) |
| Torsten Rasch | The Duchess of Malfi (Julia) |
| Smetana | The Bartered Bride (Mařenka) extracts |
| Strauss (J.) | Die Fledermaus (Rosalinde) |
| Tchaikovsky | Iolanta (Iolanta) |
| Verdi | Don Carlos (Tebaldo) |
| Wagner | Parsifal (First Squire, Flower Maiden) |
| Weinberg | The Passenger (Katya) |
Julia Sporsén’s Concert Repertoire
| Brahms | Requiem |
|---|---|
| Beethoven | Mass in C |
| Elgar | The Kingdom |
| Gounod | St Cecilia Mass |
| Haydn | The Creation |
| Handel | Jephtha (Iphis) |
| Mendelssohn | Psalm 42 |
| Mozart | Requiem |
| Pergolesi | Stabat Mater |
| Rutter | Psalmfest |
| Saint-Saens | Requiem |
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