Sunday, September 28, 2008

Nancy Yuen

Nancy Yuen is a singer.

Life and career



Born in Hong Kong and based in the UK and Singapore, Chinese soprano Nancy Yuen Miu Fun, a top graduate of the Royal Academy of Music, London, has made Cio-cio-san her signature role, winning great international critical acclaim. She made her operatic debut immediately upon graduation in this demanding Puccini title role with the Welsh National Opera and has since repeated the role all over the world, notably with the English National Opera, West Australian Opera, Opera Queensland, Opera Northern Ireland, Singapore Lyric Opera, the 1994 New Zealand International Festival of Arts, the 1995 Barbados Opera Festival and the Royal Albert Hall production by David Freeman 1998, 2000 and 2003.

Other operatic roles include Romilda , Violetta , Aida , Gilda , Titania , Rosalinda , Nedda (Pagliacci, Siok Imm , Leonora , the title role of Tosca, Liza , Mimi , Jenny , Micaela , Pamina with Opera Queensland, Donna Anna and Liu .

She will make her role debut as the Countess in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro this year with Singapore Lyric Opera, and give recitals and concerts in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, China and the UK. Since July 2003 Nancy has been the Head of Vocal Studies at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore.

On December 12, 2000, Nancy married Singaporean lawyer Toh Weng Cheong at the Hotel InterContinental Hotel Singapore.

Concerts



She has a repertoire ranging from Baroque to contemporary and performs regularly at the main UK venues, and in Europe, the United States, the Middle East and Asia. The many orchestras she has sung with include the London Mozart Players, the BBC Concert Orchestra, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, Tivoli Symphony Orchestra and most recently the West Australia Symphony Orchestra . She has also recorded for the BBC, Radio Television Hong Kong and Radio FM, New Zealand. She has performed the soprano solos in Messiah, Creation, Seasons, Nelson Mass, Christmas Oratorio, Carmina Burana, Elijah, Monteverdi’s Vespers, Mozart’s Requiem and Mass in C Minor, Poulenc’s Gloria, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the Brahms, Faure and Verdi Requiems, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony and Janá?ek’s Glagolitic Mass.

In 2004 she released her first solo CD, “Per L’amore” with the Siam Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Somtow Sucharitkul. In 2005 she repeated her performance as Cio-cio-san at the Singapore Esplanade Theatre with Singapore Lyric Opera and made her debut with the Singapore Chinese Orchestra, singing the role of Princess Han Li Bao in the world premiere of operatic cantata Zheng He, written specially for her by Law Wai Lun, as part of the Singapore Arts Festival. She also repeated the title role of Mae Naak with Bangkok Opera, a coloratura role created for her by Somtow Sucharitkul in 2003. She made her debut with the Macau Symphony Orchestra, singing the soprano solo in Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.

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