Danielle de Niese (born 11 April 1979) is a lyric soprano. After success as a young child in singing competitions in Australia, she moved to the USA where she developed an operatic career. She has come to widespread public attention with her performances as Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare at Glyndebourne, England, in 2005.
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De Niese was born in Melbourne, Australia, after her parents, Chris and Beverly, had migrated from Sri Lanka to Australia as teenagers — she is of Sri Lankan Burgher heritage.[1] In 1988, at the age of 9, she became the youngest ever winner of the Australian TV programme Young Talent Time, singing a Whitney Houston medley, for which the prize was A$ 5,000 and a Yamaha baby grand piano, which she still owns.[1]
In 1990, her family moved to Los Angeles, where she became a regular guest host of the TV programme L.A. Kids for which she won an Emmy Award at the age of 16.[2]
De Niese made her professional operatic debut at the age of 15 with the Los Angeles Opera. She became the youngest singer ever to participate in the Young Artists Studio at the Metropolitan Opera,[3] where she debuted in 1998 at the age of 19 as Barbarina in a new production of Le nozze di Figaro directed by Jonathan Miller and conducted by James Levine. She was subsequently asked to perform the title role in the Met's production of Maurice Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges. Other Met roles include Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare (2007), Euridice in Orfeo ed Euridice (2009), and Susanna in the same production of Le Nozze di Figaro in which she sang Barbarina in 1998.[4]
De Niese's still growing career has ranged through early Baroque music (Poppea in L'incoronazione di Poppea), via Handel, Mozart and contemporary opera premieres (RAAFF by Robin de Raaff, 2004, De Nederlandse Opera)[5] at major opera houses around the world, to Broadway (Les Misérables) and film (Hannibal) roles.
She has appeared in productions of a number of Baroque operas on stage and on DVD, for example the Les Arts Florissants production of Les Indes galantes by Jean-Philippe Rameau, and as Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare, directed by David McVicar, at Glyndebourne in 2005, 2006 and 2009, and in the same production at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2007.
At the end of 2006, when De Nederlandse Opera staged the three Mozart/Da Ponte operas conducted by Ingo Metzmacher, de Niese sang Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro and Despina in Così fan tutte.
De Niese (called Danni by her friends and colleagues) married Gus Christie, grandson of John Christie and chairman of Glyndebourne Festival Opera,[8] on 19 December 2009 in St Bartholomew-the-Great, London.[9] Since her marriage she has lived at Glyndebourne in Sussex, England.