A Polish contralto with a wide tessitura, Ewa Podleś came to prominence on the international opera and recording scene with her focus on operatic works by Handel and Rossini. Born in Warsaw on April 26, 1952, Eva Maria Podleś studied singing at the Frédéric Chopin Academy of Music before going on to win numerous prizes in competitions in Athens, Geneva, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, and Toulouse. She then won the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, where she was awarded third prize in 1978. First seen in Rossini's The Barber of Seville at the 1984 Aix-en-Provence Festival, she made her American debut in Handel's Rinaldo at New York's Metropolitan Opera, after performing the role at Paris's Théâtre du Châtelet. Since then, she took on a succession of roles in the world's greatest concert halls: Rome (Handel's Giulio Cesare in 1985), Vancouver (Bellini's Norma in 1989), London's Covent Garden (Rossini's William Tell in 1990), Milan's La Scala (Rossini's Count Ory in 1991 and Tancredi in 1993), the Paris Opera (Saint-Saëns' Samson et Dalila ) and Venice's La Fenice (Rossini's Semiramide). Her three-octave range enabled Ewa Podleś to tackle a wide register up to mezzo-soprano, and a repertoire that covered the Baroque period to 20th-century works including Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Penderecki. This eclecticism is reflected in her recordings of Mozart's Requiem conducted by Michel Corboz (1991), Rossini's Trancrède with Alberto Zedda (1995), the recitals Russian Melodies (1993), Airs Célèbres (1996) and Rossini: Arias for Contralto/Mezzo-Soprano (1996). Other releases included Handel: Ariodante with Les Musiciens du Louvre and Marc Minkowski (1997), with whom she also recorded Offenbach: Orphée aux enfers (1998). She recorded Gluck's Orphée et Eurydice twice (in 1993 with Patrick Peire and 2006 with Peter Maag), as well as 19 Chopin Melodies with pianist Abdel Rahman El Bacha (1999). Returning to the Metropolitan Opera in 2008 for Ponchielli's La Gioconda, Ewa Podleś also performed Massenet's Cendrillon at the Opéra-Comique de Paris in 2011, before retiring from the stage in 2017 after a final appearance in Donizetti's La Fille du régiment at Barcelona's Liceu. She died of lung cancer in Warsaw, Poland on January 19, 2024, at the age of 71.
