Hear the moods

hidden in the music

Praised for her special ‘ability to express the moods hidden in the music – from sadness to exuberance’, mezzosoprano/contralto Eva Kroon in recent years has come to the forefront of the Dutch music scene as a singer of choice for roles for the lower female voice, steering, for instance, the third act of Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann ‘to a seldom heard highlight’ (Theaterkrant).

Eva Kroon studied both piano and voice at the conservatories of Utrecht and The Hague, and gained her master in Opera Singing at Dutch National Opera Academy. Early roles include Second Lady (The Magic Flute), Gluck’s Orfeo and Purcell’s Dido. She followed workshops in Berlin and at Dutch National Opera (French repertoire, with Jean-Philippe Lafont and Leontina Vaduva). From 2012-2017 she was coached by Abbie Furmansky.

After working with conductor Stéphane Denève in 2015 as an understudy in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites (joining the production as an off-stage voice and going on for one of the sisters a couple of times), she has been a regular feature at Dutch National Opera. She was Anna to Eva-Maria Westbroek’s Didon in a scene from Berlioz’s Les Troyens in a one-off gala performance. She appeared with the same soprano as Musico in Manon Lescaut.

Off-stage voices have become something of a speciality at Dutch National Opera, since she sang, with Günther Groissböck and Christopher Ventris, as the Voice from Heaven in Parsifal and caught international attention as an ‘appealingly voiced’ (Bachtrack) La voix de la mère in Les contes d’Hoffmann, alongside Ermonela Jaho’s Antonia and Erwin Schrott’s Docteur Miracle, of which specialist website www.offenbach-hoffmann.de wrote: ‘This excellent trio of interpreters offered a listening enjoyment which will be hard to beat.’ In the 2019-2020 season she will sing the Voice from Above in  Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten. In January 2020 she will make her debut in Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía, Valencia, as Erste Magd in Strauss’s Elektra.

During the Summer of 2018, Eva Kroon temporarily extended her natural Fach when she was asked to sing the role of Amneris in Aida for Opera Spanga (The Netherlands), a ‘brilliant’ performance according to Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. British magazine Opera wrote: ‘The most complete performance came from Eva Kroon – such was her command of the words, music and drama that the production could have been build as Amneris.’

In the 2018-2019 season, Eva created the roles of Cook/Woman/Ritual Singer in Micha Hamel’s Caruso a Cuba (‘Eva Kroon’s mezzo was beautiful and buttery’ said Opera Today) for Dutch National Opera. In April 2017, she sang the lead role of emperor Wilhelm in the world premiere of Jan-Peter de Graaff’s chamber opera De Grens and repeated her role in an extended version of this opera, performed in the autumn of 2018 for Opera Zuid.

In addition to Frau ohne Schatten, Eva Kroon will return to Dutch National Opera in 2019-2020 in Wagner’s Die Walküre, singing Grimgerde alongside Martina Serafin, Eva-Maria Westbroek and Iain Paterson, in Pierre Audi’s production.

On the opera stage, Eva has worked with conductors such as Stéphane Denève, Marc Albrecht and Carlo Rizzi. On the concert platform, she has participated as a soloist in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion at the Royal Concertgebouw and in such works as the Verdi Requiem, Rossini’s Petite messe solenelle, the Mozart Requiem and Bach’s St. John’s Passion. In recital, she has sung song cycles by Mahler, Wagner, Brahms and Strauss. She has appeared regularly on Dutch national radio, both in performance and in interviews.

Eva Kroon is preparing roles such as Erda in Das Rheingold and Siegfried, First Norn in Götterdämmerung and Geneviève in Pelléas et Mélisande. She studies with noted dramatic soprano Nadine Secunde.