The soprano Michaela Kaune was born in Hamburg and studied at the Music Academy there with Annie Schoonus and Judith Beckmann. She was a prize winner at the 1996 Belvedere Wettbewerb in Vienna and at the Bundeswettbewerb Gesang in the same year. Among others awards was the Otto-Kasten-Preis of the Deutsche Bühnenverein in 1999. Since 1997 Michaela Kaune has been a member of the German Opera Berlin, where she has appeared as Prinzessin Natalie in Henze’s Prinz von Homburg, Pamina in Die Zauberflöte, Micaëla in Carmen, Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust, Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni, the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro, Anna in Marschner’s Hans Heiling, Euridice in Orpheus and Euridice and in the title rôle of Arabella. She has sung the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro at the Cologne Opera, at the Semperoper Dresden, the Brussels Théâtre de la Monnaie, the Opéra National de Paris, at the Salzburg Festivalandat the Aalto Theater Essen.
At the Wiesbaden Opera, the Cologne Opera House, the Frankfurt Opera, the Hamburg State Opera, the Bavarian State Opera Munich(under Zubin Mehta)and the Ravinia Festival(under Christoph Eschenbach) she sang Agathe in Der Freischütz; at the Semperoper Dresden and at the Aalto Theatre EssenFiordiligi in Così fan tutte, at the Basle Theatre and at the Graz Opera Tatyana in Eugene Onegin, at the Bavarian State Opera MunichPamina, Marie in The Bartered Bride and Eva in Die Meistersinger, at the Opéra de Montpellierand at the Bavarian State Opera MunichDonna Elvira, at the Aalto Theater Essen Cordelia in Aribert Reimann’s Lear, the title-rôle of Katya Kabanova at the Vlaamse Opera, Antwerp, Freia at the Nederlandse Opera Amsterdam, Hanna Glawari and Fiordiligi at the Aalto Theatre Essen, Micaëla at the Semperoper Dresdenandthe title-rôle of Rusalka at the Schleswig-Holstein Festival. She has collaborated with distinguished orchestras and conductors in the concert hall, and her recordings include Strauss’s Orchestral Songs with the NDR Hannover under Eiji Oue, Henze’s Nachtstücke und Arien with the NDR Hamburg under Peter Ruzicka, and Mahler’s Second Symphony with the NHK Symphony Orchestra Tokyo under Jun Märkl.
