Soprano Anja Strauss has firmly established herself in the vocal profession as an extremely experienced and multifaceted performer, being equally at home in the Opera, Lied and Oratorio repertoire.

Her operatic roles include Oscar in Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera , Clorinda in Rossini's La Cenerentola, Gretel in five different productions of Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel, Eurydice in Offenbach's Orphée aux Enfers, Miss Wordsworth in Britten's Albert Herring, Lauretta in Puccini's Gianni Schicchi, Papagena in Mozart's Magic Flute and Despina in Mozart's Cosí fan tutte .

She has sung with the opera companies of Sacramento, Stockton Opera Association, Townsend Opera Players Modesto, Golden Gate Opera San Francisco, as well as the German Opera companies of Lübeck, Kiel, Flensburg, Potsdam and Detmold.

A passionate Lied singer Ms. Strauss has performed in recitals at Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall and the Goethe Institute in New York City, with the Wagner Society in San Francisco, the Olympic Music Festival in Seattle, the Mozart Society of California in Carmel, the Oakland Lyric Opera and in Lübeck, Germany. Besides standard Lied repertoire she enjoys collaborating with contemporary composers, as in the San Jose Sate University's Faculty Composer's concert. She premiered a song cycle -written for her- at the Peabody Institute of Music in Baltimore, she sang the world premiere of excerpts of Kirk Mechem's new opera Pride and Prejudice at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, and she will be the featured soprano soloist for Pulitzer Prize winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis' song cycle "Awakenings and a Double Lullaby " at the BDDS Festival in Madison, WI and the Music in the Vineyards Festival in Napa Valley, CA, with the composer at the piano. She specializes in German cabaret songs from the 1920's and 1930's and is a member of the Cabaret Trio Girlkulture.

Originally from Lübeck, Germany, Anja Strauss has worked with such renowned German orchestras such as the Hamburg Symphony, the Kiel Philharmonic and the Schleswig-Holstein Symphony. She was the featured guest artist at the Millennium's Gala of the Klassik Philharmonie Hamburg and performed in a Gala Concert at the Teatro Bramante Urbania in Italy. In the US she performed with the Avedis Chamber Music Ensemble at the San Francisco Palace of the Legion of Honor, the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, the San Francisco Sinfonietta, the Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra and the Fremont Symphony. As the winner of the San Francisco Community Music Center's Faculty competition she presented a selection of Mozart's Concert Arias with the CMC Orchestra at Kanbar Hall.

In addition to operas and concert works, Ms. Strauss has performed an extensive repertoire of sacred music, ranging from Bach and Vivaldi to Respighi and Lili Boulanger. She has toured Germany, Poland, Italy an Slovenia, singing the solo parts of Bach's B Minor Mass, Mozart's Requiem and C Minor Mass, Haydn's Seasons, Fauré's Requiem and the German Requiem by Brahms. Other highlights include a performance of Mozart's Requiem for the September 11 Commemoration at Lincoln Center in New York City and the recording of the Petite Messe Solennelle by Rossini under her maiden name Anja Burmeister for the label Dabringhaus und Grimm.

Anja Strauss graduated from the Juilliard School, where she studied with Cynthia Hoffmann, and from the Musikhochschule Lübeck (Germany), where her teacher was Prof. Günter Binge. She has appeared in Master Classes of Christa Ludwig, Bernd Weikl, Ubbaldo Fabbri, Elly Ameling and Barbara Bonney.

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