Eglise Gutiérrez

Eglise Gutiérrez is a lyric coloratura soprano born in Holguín, Cuba who emigrated to Miami, United States.

She studied in Havana, Miami and Philadelphia at the Academy of Vocal Arts, making her debut as Lucia di Lammermoor in Bogotá, Colombia in 2003.

Winner of the Montserrat Caballé and Marian Anderson competitions, her European debut was at the Wexford Festival as Maria di Rohan by Donizetti in 2005.

In 2003 she made her Carnegie Hall debut in New York in Mozart's Requiem and Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, continuing in consecutive seasons as Philine in Mignon, Lakmé and as Amina in Bellini's La Sonnambula, a role she has also sung in Cagliari and in Detroit conducted by Renata Scotto.

She has sung in Helsinki, Prague, Nice, at the Seattle Opera, Elvira in I Puritani and Violetta in La Traviata (also in Cincinnati and Miami), Lucia di Lammermoor at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico, the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires and the Savonlinna Festival in Finland, Gilda (Rigoletto) in Hamburg, Vancouver, Trieste, Rome, Athens, in Massenet's Cendrillon at the Santa Fe Opera and at the Sarasota Opera as Lakmé.

Other characters in her repertoire include Nannetta in Falstaff, Hanna Glawari in The Merry Widow, Liù in Turandot, Adina in Elisir d'amore, Doña Francisquita and in the Cuban zarzuela Cecilia Valdés.

In the 2010 season she made her debut as Linda di Chamounix at the Covent Garden in London.

She studied classical guitar at the National School of Art in Havana. Since childhood she always liked to sing but, when she was a teenager, what she liked was rock: Pink Floyd, Queen, Led Zeppelin".

"She liked classical music but she didn't like opera or, rather, she didn't have an operatic background. One of the things she did on the streets with her friends was to make fun of opera singers, imitating them.

She was a very good guitar student. The classical guitar school in Cuba is very demanding. She wanted to enter the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) but didn't know in what. In guitar, she knew they weren't going to accept me and so she thought about entering acting, she really liked humor and dramatic art".

But some friends who had heard her sing convinced her to take the entrance exams for the vocal arts faculty.

"With a friend from her year she prepared, without having taken a single singing class in her life. She arranged two songs and took the test. Everything was like a game. And she got first place in the ranking. They gave her a vocalization test and it seems they saw the range of her voice".

"Later, one of the first things she heard was María Callas and with her she truly began to love opera. Callas is, to this day, her greatest inspiration but she also admires singers like Joan Sutherland, Montserrat Caballé, Renata Scotto and Anna Moffo".

"In Cuba it would never have occurred to her to think that one day she would have the great fortune to work with Renata Scotto but she won a scholarship with her, in New York, and she has been a very important person in her career. With Caballé she hasn't had the opportunity to work, but she won a prize in her competition, when she was studying in the United States".

"In Cuba there is a great lyric tradition. And in Holguín, the city where she was born, the talent of singers is incredible. One of the great voices Cuba has had is the Holguín-born María Luisa Clark".

"Besides, we had a great influence from the Russian school, which is extremely rich in classical music. Many Cuban instrumentalists and singers went to study in the Soviet Union, among them her teacher, María Eugenia Barrios, who studied at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow".

But, despite winning several competitions in Cuba, the young soprano never sang there professionally. Shortly after graduating she moved to the United States, in 1997. Her voice was still a diamond in the rough.

"Training in Cuba helped her tremendously to take her second step, in the United States. One thinks that graduating from a place is enough and you don't have to do anything else, but it's quite the opposite. You have to have a lot of patience if you want to come close to perfection, which is her goal. Eglis wants to be a good artist, she wants to be honest with art".

"In the USA many doors opened for her, she met many people who believed in her talent and began her professional career in Miami, with zarzuelas like Cecilia Valdés and Doña Francisquita, and many concerts".

"In Cuba she sang a bit of everything because her voice is not light and its color tended to confuse many people but in Miami a teacher, Manny Pérez, when he heard her suggested she concentrate on bel canto. He told her: 'The voice you have is very special for this repertoire' and they began working more on technique, high notes, clarity. With him her vocal technique improved tremendously".

Pérez advised her to take the entrance exams at the prestigious Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia, where she obtained a scholarship and studied for four years.

At the academy she met her husband, Turkish baritone Burak Bilgili.

"Her daughter is named Lucía because she was performing Lucia di Lammermoor, the opera by Gaetano Donizetti, at the Grand Opera of Florida, when, at the final performance, she found out she was pregnant. And during her pregnancy she had her great debut at Deutsche Oper Berlin with Lucia di Lammermoor, alongside tenor Roberto Alagna".

"Later, at the Savonlinna festival, in Finland, at seven months pregnant, she sang that role again and 45 days after having her daughter she began rehearsing it in Vancouver, Canada".

"It is an opera that has been very important to Eglis, with which she also made her debut at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico, at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires and in Bogotá".

"In Latin America there is great interest in opera and she has worked with some Latin American musicians, including Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez, with whom she made her debut at the Teatro Real in Madrid, in I Puritani by Bellini. She was almost five months pregnant and it was a wonderful experience".

In less than a decade this Cuban soprano based in the United States has managed to win over the most demanding international audiences. Winner of international competitions such as the Montserrat Caballé and Marian Anderson, she began to stand out after her debut as Lucia di Lammermoor in Bogotá in 2003, making her European debut as the protagonist of the rarely performed Maria di Rohan by Donizetti at the Wexford Festival in 2005.

Subsequently came performances at some of the world's major stages, including the Colón in Buenos Aires, the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico and the Savonlinna Festival (in all three occasions with Lucia di Lammermoor), the Rome Opera, the Opernhaus in Zurich, Carnegie Hall in New York, the Deutsche Oper in Berlin and La Monnaie in Brussels, highlighting achievements such as her La Sonnambula in Detroit in 2008 alongside two living legends, conductor Richard Bonynge and Renata Scotto as stage director, and the concert version of I Puritani that in 2010 she sang with Juan Diego Flórez at the Teatro Real in Madrid.

She sang in La Muda di Portici at the Opéra Comique in Paris and alongside Kate Aldrich will star in Romeo and Juliet at the Caramoor Festival, as well as a concert version of La Sonnambula in Washington; and in 2013 she will make her debut at the Liceu in Barcelona singing the four heroines of The Tales of Hoffmann.

As for recordings, she can be seen performing in a DVD of La Sonnambula from Cagliari, in a production by Hugo de Ana under the baton of Maurizio Benini, as well as accompanying Joyce Di Donato in Massenet's Cinderella at the Covent Garden in London, a production by Laurent Pelly conducted by Bertrand de Billy which has also been shown on the big screen in various countries; and on disc, she stars in Donizetti's Linda di Chamounix live in 2009 with which she made her debut precisely on the London stage, released last year by the Opera Rara label, conducted by Sir Mark Elder.