Puerto Rican Soprano Ana María Martínez Gets High Ranking

Viva Latina: Soprano Ana María Martínez
(Photo: Tom Specht)

"Now it is Ana María Martínez’s turn, a soprano singer that the London’s Opera Magazine ranks among the current top lyric sopranos. She is a Grammy Award winner with an international career that spans the world’s most important opera houses and concert halls. With a repertoire that encompasses opera’s most intriguing and diverse leading female roles, she engages her audiences time and time again with signature roles and captivating recordings. Ana María was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the daughter of Puerto Rican opera singer Evangelína Colón and Ángel Martínez, a Cuban psychoanalyst. She moved with her parents to the United States and grew up a few blocks north of the Lincoln Center in New York, spending summers in Puerto Rico. Her first stage experience was in Puerto Rico, as Laurey in a high school production of Oklahoma! Ana María went on to study music in the prestigious Juilliard School, graduating in 1993, and rose to prominence when she won the Plácido Domingo International Voice Competition Operalia 1995. She went on to work with the Houston Grand Opera studio, which gave her a platform from which to launch an international career. Today, Martínez has sung every major lyric role (including Mimi in La Bohème, Violetta in La Traviata, Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni, and the Countess in Le Nozze di Figaro) in venues such as the Metropolitan Opera, Teatro alla Scala, the Vienna Staatsoper, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the San Francisco Opera." [Source]