Mezzo-soprano Nora Sourouzian opened the 2024-25 season with a highly acclaimed Azucena in Il trovatore at the Staatstheater Braunschweig, where she is currently also on stage as Prioress Madame de Croissy in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites. As part of the International May Festival, she sang the mezzo-soprano part in Verdi’s Requiem under Leo McFall at the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden in 2025. In 2026, she will sing the role of Giulietta and the part of the Mother in Les contes d’Hoffmann at the Graz Opera.
In the past season, Nora Sourouzian was successful as Amneris at the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen and in an arena production of Aida in Stuttgart, Hanover and Berlin, as well as in Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in Mexico.
The mezzo-soprano has also recently impressed as Ježibaba in Dvořák’s Rusalka at the Komische Oper Berlin, at the Opéra du Rhin in Strasbourg and in St. Gallen. Gallen, as Eboli in Don Carlo Essen, in Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and with Schönberg’s Lied der Waldtaube from the Gurrelieder with the Sønderjylland Symphony Orchestra, as Amneris in Verdi’s Aida at the Jyske Opera and at the Braunschweig Opera as Marguerite in La damnation du Faust at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico. She has performed the role of Azucena at Graz Opera, the Aalto Theatre in Essen, Seattle Opera and the Royal Danish Opera House in Copenhagen.
Nora Sourouzian has already demonstrated her great acting and vocal range in very different roles and musical styles: at the Wexford Festival she celebrated great success in the title roles of Fauré’s Pénélope, as well as the rarely performed Massenet operas Thérèse and La Navarraise (as Anita) and returned there as Herodias (A. Mariotte, Salomé). At the Atelier Lyrique de Tourcoing she sang the role of Zulema in Théodore Dubois Aben Hamet. St. Gallen engaged her as Laura in Ponchielli’s La gioconda and as Leonora di Guzman in Donizetti’s La favorita, a role that later took her to the Bavarian State Opera in Munich as a cover for Elīna Garanča. She made her role debut as Princess Eboli in Verdi’s Don Carlo at the Burg Gars Opera Festival. Nora Sourouzian has appeared as Carmen in 22 productions, including at the West Palm Beach Opera in Miami, in St. Gallen, Cagliari, Bologna, Cologne, Leipzig, Oslo, Québec and Cardiff. She was also engaged as a cover for this role at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. She brought the two roles of Sister Helen Prejean and Mrs Patrick De Rocher (Joseph’s mother) in Jake Heggie’s opera Dead Man Walking to stage maturity at the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen.
Nora Sourouzian’s discography includes a CD recording of the production of Théodore Dubois Aben Hamet, conducted by Jean-Claude Malgoire, a DVD of the opera O rapaz de bronze by Nuno Côrte-Real and a CD/DVD of the 34th Opera Gala of the Montreál Opera in 2009.
Conductors such as Paolo Carignani, Cyril Diedrich, Christoph Eschenbach, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Jean-Claude Malgoire, Marc Minkowski, Leif Segerstam, Ed Spanjaard, Franz Welser-Möst and Johannes Wildner have repeatedly invited Nora Sourouzian to give concerts with works such as Mahler’s 3rd Symphony or songs by a travelling composer. Symphony or Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, the Haydn cantata Arianna a Naxos, the Mozart Requiem, the Brahms Liebesliederwalzer, Berlioz Nuits d’été, Frank Martin’s Cornet, his oratorio Golgotha, or Wagner’s Wesendonck-Lieder.
Nora Sourouzian has won a number of major Canadian singing competitions and was a finalist at the Belvedere Competition in Vienna. This was followed by invitations to many major opera houses such as the Zurich Opera House, the Grand Théâtre de Genève, the Opéra de Lausanne, the Opéra St. Gallen, the Opéra du Châtelet Paris, the Teatro Sao Paolo Lisbon, De Nederlandse Opera Amsterdam, Det Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Den Norske Opera Oslo, the Welsh National Opera in Cardiff, the Opera House in Riga, the Leipzig Opera, the Cologne Opera, the Teatro Communale di Bologna, the Teatro Massimo di Palermo, the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, the Teatro Lirico di Cagliari, the opera houses of Québec and Montréal and the New National Theatre Tokyo.
Nora Sourouzian comes from a French-Armenian family, has French and Canadian citizenship, studied at McGill University in Montreal and was then a member of the Young Artists Programme of the Internationaal Opera Centrum Nederland in Amsterdam. She then became a member of the ensemble at the Staatstheater Kassel for two years. She lives in Berlin.
06/2025
