Wallis Giunta, Alden Gatt

Wallis Giunta

Irish-Canadian mezzo, Wallis Giunta, has been named “Young Singer of the Year” at the 2018 International Opera Awards. She has upcoming debuts with Seattle Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, Scottish Opera, the Sydney Opera House, The Edinburgh Festival and the Deutsche Oper am Rhein. Her 2018/19 season includes debuts with the BBC Proms Festival in a program celebrating Leonard Bernstein, with the Academy of Ancient Music as Cherubino in London, with the MDR Symphony Orchestra in Haydn’s Scena di Berenice, and with the Royal Opera House Muscat for La Traviata. She also debuts the title roles in Carmen and Der Rosenkavalier, along with Rossini’s Rosina for Oper Leipzig, and debuts as Idamante in Idomeneo with Opera Atelier. Wallis’s 2017/18 season saw two role debuts for Opera North: the title role in Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortiléges, and Dinah in Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti, both to great critical acclaim. She also returned to Koerner Hall in concert, and to Oper Leipzig as Angelina & Cherubino, while debuting Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus and the Gymnasiast in a new production of Berg’s Lulu.

The 2016/17 season saw her debut with Opera North, performing the title role in Rossini’s La Cenerentola, with Teatro di Bolzano as Cherubino, and with the Munich Radio Orchestra and Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra in concert. Wallis also returned to Opera Atelier, debuting Dido in Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas, and to both the Toronto Symphony and the Real Orquesta Sinfónica de Sevilla for new productions of Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins as Anna I, one of her signature roles. In the past few seasons, she has made several major European debuts: Le Théâtre du Châtelet (Paris) & Teatro dell’Opera di Roma (Adams’ I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky), Oper Frankfurt (Carmen), the Hamburg Symphony (Candide), and the Nürnberger Symphony and Stuttgart Festival Orchestra. Other recent performances include Rigoletto & The Merry Widow at The Metropolitan Opera, and Andriessen’s Anaïs Nin in Toronto.

Wallis is the grateful recipient of the 2016 Bernard Diamant Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts. She is a 2013 graduate of both the Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artist Development Program & the Juilliard School’s Artist Diploma in Opera Studies, and a 2011 graduate of the Canadian Opera Company Ensemble Studio.

Alden Gatt

Since 2016, Alden Gatt has been a coach at Oper Leipzig. He recently conducted Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel with the Gewandhaus Orchester, and also performed selections from Mozart piano concerti with the Gewandhaus as the piano soloist. After winning the Marilyn Horne Song Competition at the Music Academy of the West in 2015, Mr. Gatt accompanied Ben Dickerson in NYC’s Greene Space, which was broadcast live. He also performed at Carnegie Hall as part of “The Song Continues” Masterclass Series.

Originally from Naples, Florida, Mr. Gatt began winning top awards in many piano competitions at an early age, including the top “Turiel Prize” in the Naples Music Club, and the first prize in the Southwest Florida Concerto Competition, where he performed Prokofiev’s First Piano Concerto with the Southwest Florida Symphony. He also received second place in the NY State MTA Piano Competition, and was a semi-finalist in the Anton G Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Dresden, Germany.

Mr. Gatt graduated from the Eastman School of Music in 2010, where he studied solo piano, accompanying and conducting, with Barry Snyder, Dr. Jean Barr, and Brad Lubman respectively. Having lived in Beijing for a year during high school, he minored in Chinese at the University of Rochester, and he also speaks French, German and Italian.