Julia Faulkner first came to national attention as a winner of the 1985 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. The New York Times wrote:"If audience response could have given a first prize Sunday it would have gone to Julia Faulkner…and she would have deserved it. Miss Faulkner sang with a creamy, clear and apparently effortless soprano sound.”
Close on the heels of her success at the Met, she made her European stage debut in Lyon, France, and returned the following season to sing Alice Ford in Verdi's Falstaff under the baton of John Elliot Gardner. In 1987 she joined the ensemble of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, appearing in many works including Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, Die Zauberflöte, Richard Strauss's Capriccio and Wolf Ferrari's Le Donne Curiose. In the 1991/92 season Miss Faulkner became a leading soprano at the Vienna State Opera, where she was in residence until 1997. It was here that she gained recognition throughout the world as a Strauss and Mozart singer of the very first rank. Her many roles with the company included the title roles of Arabella and Ariadne, the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, the Countess in Capriccio and Le Nozze di Figaro, Rosalinda in Die Fledermaus, Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni, and Gutrune in Götterdämmerung.
Faulkner has sung frequently on many of the great opera stages of the world, including La Scala, Berlin, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Leipzig, Paris, Amsterdam, Genoa, Bordeaux and Stockholm. In 1994 Julia returned to America to make her Metropolitan Opera debut in the title role of Strauss' Arabella. She remained on the Met roster regularly and has most recently sung in a new production of Die Frau Ohne Schatten. Faulkner's concert and recording career is equally distinguished and has included engagements with the Berlin Philharmonic, L.A. Philharmonic under Salonen, the Cleveland Orchestra under Dohnanyi, the Concertgebouw under Chailly, the San Francisco Symphony under Tilson-Thomas, the Minnesota Orchestra under Jeffrey Tate and the Dresdner Staatskapelle under Giuseppi Sinopoli. She has recordings on the Sony, Decca, EMI, Naxos, and Deutsche Grammophon labels, which are very highly regarded in the international press.
Julia Faulkner holds both Bachelor and Master degrees from Indiana University, and is a highly regarded master teacher as well as performer. She is sought after for her expertise in master classes and regularly teaches at young artist programs such as La Musica Lirica in Italy and the Tyrolean Opera Program in Austria. She has award-winning students singing worldwide on opera, concert and music theater stages. She joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin School of Music in the fall of 2003, where she is now Assistant Professor of Voice.
