Grammy-nominated Carole Farley made her Metropolitan Opera début at the age of nineteen in the title role of Lulu (the Met’s first production), a role she has repeated over a hundred times in four languages (German, English, French and Italian). Carole Farley returned to the Metropolitan Opera for the title role in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Shostakovich, the only non-Russian in the cast. Her more than a hundred performances of Salome in opera houses around the world have been highly acclaimed. As a regular guest of the world’s opera houses, she has performed at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Canadian Opera, Oper der Stadt Köln, New York City Opera, Welsh National Opera, Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, and in Zürich, Düsseldorf, Paris, Turin, Lyons, Brussels, Nice and Florence, and many other cities.
Particular highlights in her career include over 75 performances of the acclaimed Paris production of The Merry Widow and the Lyubimov-staged Lulu for Turin which was awarded the Abbiati Prize in Italy. She has claimed the role of Jenny in Mahagonny as her own, following huge successes in Buenos Aires at Teatro Colón. Her performances of Poulenc’s La voix humaine and Menotti’s The Telephone have been filmed by Decca in co-production with the BBC, and now re-issued on DVD, a best-seller in The New York Times charts. This film, first shown on prime time television by the BBC, is her third for the Poulenc opera. The first two films were done in Sydney by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation with the Sydney Symphony, one in French and one in English.
To celebrate the Kurt Weill centennial she sang a series of concerts with the Bamberger Symphoniker and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and a recital in Miami in which she traced the steps of his musical journey from Berlin to Broadway to Hollywood. She also concertized with the orchestras of SWR of Baden-Baden and Freiburg, Lyon, BBC, Stockholm, Spokane, and the ABC Orchestras of Australia in evenings of Grieg, Richard and Johann Strauss, Berlioz, Henze, and Wagner.
Carole Farley’s orchestral appearances have included most of the leading orchestras in the United States, including the New York Philharmonic, Boston, Pittsburgh and Baltimore Symphonies, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Minnesota Orchestras, and the National Symphony, with conductors Levine, Mehta, Skrowaszewski, Dorati, Kostelanetz, Zinman and Sir Andrew Davis. Her European orchestra concerts include the BBC Symphony, BBC Philharmonic, Hallé Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic, Concertgebouw, Orchestre National de France and the Radio Orchestras of Brussels, Paris, Turin, Cologne, Rome, The Hague, Helsinki and Barcelona, with Levine, Boulez, Martinon, Bertini, Santi, Pritchard, Maazel, Downes, Salonen, Davis, Foster, Leitner, Fiore, and others. In 2006 she did a Latin American tour with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and an international tour with the National Chamber Orchestra of Toulouse, opera productions in France (Wozzeck and The Merry Widow), and in many European houses, including Parsifal, Die Walküre, Salome and The Makropoulos Case.
Her extensive discography includes over fifty titles, with multiple awards including the Grand Prix du Disque, Deutsche Schallplatten Award, Gramophone Editor’s Choice, Gramophone’s CD of the Month, Grammy nominations, and many others. Other recent highlights included performances of Britten’s War Requiem in San Sebastian, Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, Schoenberg’s Erwartung at the Schleswig- Holstein Festival, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Ah, perfido! with The Hague Residentie Orchestra; Mozart arias with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra at the Bermuda Festival; Kurt Weill’s opera The Protagonist with the American Symphony Orchestra at New York’s Lincoln Center.
Recent recordings include three Kurt Weill CDs, including the world première recording of Der Neue Orpheus, a best-seller Naxos CD of Ned Rorem songs (8.559084) with the composer at the piano, songs by Ernesto Lecuona, orchestral CDs of songs by Richard Strauss, Edvard Grieg, Delius and arias by Tchaikovsky, as well as her CD of Songs by William Bolcom (8.559249), accompanied at the piano by the composer, recipient of two Grammy nominations in 2006, and Gramophone’s CD of the Month. Other triumphs include Marcel Landowski’s opera Montsegur at the Opéra de Marseille, Puccini’s Tosca, and the American première of Marc Neikrug’s opera Los Alamos at the Aspen Festival. In January 2007 she appeared at Teatro San Carlo di Napoli in a famed production of Bernstein’s Candide, conducted by Jeffrey Tate.
