Yvonne Naef

A native of Switzerland, Yvonne Naef has appeared throughout her career at the most prestigious opera houses and concert venues. Her huge repertoire mainly consists of the major mezzo roles in operas by Verdi (Aida, Il Trovatore, Don Carlo, Un ballo in Maschera) which she has sung in prominent theaters such as the Metropolitan Opera House, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, the Vienna State Opera and the Opéra de Paris. In the French repertoire she excelled in operas such as Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, Carmen, Les Troyens and La damnation de Faust, alongside her fondness for Russian operas and those of Richard Wagner.
On concert stages, Yvonne Naef performs composers ranging from Bach to Boulez with very prominent orchestras and conductors. A specialist for Mahler’s symphonies and song cycles, she has performed his Symphonies No. 2, 3 and 8, Kindertotenlieder, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Lieder aus des Knaben Wunderhorn under the direction of conductors such as Marin Also, Pierre Boulez, Semyon Bychkov, Sylvain Cambreling, Gustavo Dudamel, Christoph Eschenbach, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, James Levine, Kent Nagano, Jonathan Not and Franz Welser-Möst. Other important conductors she has worked with in numerous and disparate concert and opera projects include James Conlon, Christoph von Dohnanyi, Vladimir Fedoseyev, Ivan Fischer, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Daniele Gatti, Michael Gielen, Bernard Haitink, Mariss Jansons, Philipp Jordan, Jess López Cobos, Marc Minkowski, Seiji Ozawa, Sir Simon Rattle, Georges Prêtre and Michael Tilson Thomas.

Yvonne Naef has been a lecturer for singing at the Zurich University of the Arts since 2014.