Olena Tokar, Stephan Genz, Berner Symphonieorchester & Graziella Contratto
Biography Olena Tokar, Stephan Genz, Berner Symphonieorchester & Graziella Contratto
Olena Tokar
The Ukrainian-born soprano Olena Tokar studied at the National Peter Tchaikovsky Music Academy in Kiev and at the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy University of Music and Theatre in Leipzig, where she completed her Master’s degree in opera/musical theatre with honours in 2017. She attended a master class with KS Prof. Regina Werner-Dietrich, and has since then continued to work closely with her.
In 2008, Tokar won the Grand Prix of the International Boris Gmyria Competition in Kiev. She was a finalist at the 2010 Ferruccio Tagliavini International Singing Competition in Deutschlandsberg, Austria, and at the Francisco Viñas International Singing Competition in Barcelona. In 2012 she won first prizes at the Lortzing Competition in Leipzig and the renowned ARD Music Competition in Munich. In 2013 she was among the top five singers at the Cardiff BBC Singer of the World Competition in the opera and song categories. Invitations followed for various roles, from Rusalka to La Traviata to Marguerite and Juliette, to the Semperoper Dresden, the Vilnius City Opera, Leipzig, Cologne, Olavshallen (Norway) and Grange Park Opera (England).
Tokar was a participant in the Young Singers Project at the Salzburg Festival and the Verbier Academy, where she made her debut in the roles of Susanna and Mimì. Rolando Villazon invited her to sing on his TV show “Stars of Tomorrow”.
Tokar has been a permanent member of the Leipzig Opera since the 2009/2010 season, where her roles have included Gretel, Pamina, Papagena, Musetta, Zdenka, Mimì, Liù, Marguerite, Micaëla, Zemina and Rusalka.
With her diverse concert repertoire, Tokar regularly sings as a guest with leading orchestras such as the London Philharmonic, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Basque National Orchestra, the Residentie Orkest Den Haag, the Helsinki Philharmonic, the Ulster Orchestra, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the Manchester Camerata, the Kammerorchester Basel and the Budapest Festival Orchestra. She has worked with leading conductors including Vassily Sinaisky, Rafael Payare, Nicholas Collon, Jun Märkl, Jean-Claude Casadesus and Gábor Takács-Nagy. Tokar has also appeared on several CD recordings, such as in Mahler’s Second Symphony with the Orchestre National de Lille under Jean Casadesus and as Margret in Strauss’s Feuersnot under Ulf Schirmer. In 2023 she will sing Delilah in the world premiere recording of the opera Samson by the Swiss romantic Joachim Raff, which will also be released by Schweizer Fonogramm.
With her piano partner Igor Gryshyn, Tokar regularly performs in important music centres such as the Gasteig Munich, London’s Wigmore Hall, the LSO St. Luke’s, the Zurich Tonhalle, the Stadt Casino Basel, the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festival, the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, the Beethoven Festival Warsaw, the Spring Festival Tokyo and the Bellerive Festival. Her solo CD “Charmes” is devoted to the song repertoire of female composers. Her chamber music partners include Sol Gabetta, Tatjana Masurenko, the Gewandhaus String Quartet, the Doric String Quartet, Alec Frank-Gemmill, Alexej Gerassimez and István Kohán.
Stephan Genz
was born in Erfurt in Germany and received his early musical training as a member of the Choir of St. Thomas’s in Leipzig. He studied at the Leipzig University of Music with Hans-Joachim Beyer and at the Karlsruhe University with Mitsuko Shirai and Hartmut Höll, and also trained with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf for several years. Genz won prizes at various international competitions including the International Brahms Competition in Hamburg (1994) and the International Hugo Wolf Competition in Stuttgart (1994). In 1998 he was awarded the Brahms Prize of the State of Schleswig-Holstein, and in 2000 the Belgian music critics voted him “Young Artist of the Year”. Since then, guest contracts have taken him to leading opera houses worldwide: to the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin, the Semperoper Dresden, the Staatsoper Hamburg, the Opera National de Paris (Garnier), La Scala Milan, the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, the Grand Théâtre de Genève, La Fenice in Venice, the opera houses of Strasbourg, Cologne, Parma and Monte Carlo, and the festivals of Aix-en-Provence and Baden-Baden.
Genz has worked with Giuseppe Sinopoli, Kent Nagano, Kurt Masur, Myung-Whun Chung, Marcus Creed, Gerd Albrecht, Daniel Harding, Philippe Herreweghe, Rene Jacobs, Thomas Hengelbrock, Jesús López Cobos, Fabio Luisi, Jeffrey Tate, Mario Venzago, Eliahu Inbal and Nikolaus Harnoncourt.
Since his successful debut at the Wigmore Hall London, Genz has given recitals in the world’s major music centres including Paris (Châtelet, Champs-Elysées, Louvre, Salle Gaveau), New York (Frick Collection, Alice Tully Hall, Rockefeller Center), Tokyo (Oji Hall, Opera City Hall) and at the Cologne Philharmonic, the Alte Oper Frankfurt, La Monnaie in Brussels, the Concertgebouw Amsterdam and in San Francisco, Montreal, Washington, Kyoto, Osaka, at the Maggio Musicale Firenze, the Edinburgh Festival, and the Lucerne and Zermatt Festivals.
Over 50 CD recordings document Genz’s wide-ranging repertoire. His recital recordings have won numerous international awards: the Gramophone Award, the German Record Critics’ Prize, the Timbre de Platin and various Diapasons d’Or. Recently, Genz has been heard on the operatic stage as Eisenstein in Fledermaus, as Guglielmo in Così fan tutte at the Baden-Baden Festival, as Frank and Fritz in Korngold’s Die tote Stadt at La Fenice in Venice, and as Demetrius in Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Grand Théâtre de Genève.
Since September 2012, Genz has been a lecturer of German Repertoire at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris and, since 2020, professor of song and oratorio at the Mozarteum University Salzburg.
