James Strauss, Inês Simões - Poema (2022) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

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James Strauss, Inês Simões - Poema (2022) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

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With her unmistakably rich and luminous tone, Portuguese spinto soprano Inês Simões is known for her interpretations of contemporary music, including new commissions of operatic, symphonic, electronic, and chamber music repertoire. Inês is one half of Duo Tágide, whose bold programming encompasses works from both past and present as well as a dedicated place for Portuguese songs.

2022/23 sees an exciting new collaboration with Brazilian flautist James Strauss, beginning with a digital release, Poema, for Universal Music Group that focuses on repertoire from the last hundred years written for this unusual pairing. With her Duo Tágide, Inês will explore Schoenberg’s Book of Hanging Gardens for Reencontros de Música Contemporânea in Aveiro as well as prepare for the duo’s second CD. Following their first album Alma Ibérica, which showcased Iberian art song, this new recording will be dedicated to song cycles by Portuguese composers of the 21st century.

Concert highlights include Inês Simões’s debut at the Gulbenkian Foundation, a tour-de-force concert where she premiered six new works with the Gulbenkian Orchestra conducted by Magnus Lindberg. She was subsequently invited back to premiere Jamie Man’s opera Play conducted by Hannu Lintu, and to sing alongside Iestyn Davies in Handel’s Solomon and The Messiah. She enjoys a regular collaboration with Miso Music, who has commissioned new works especially for her. Inês has performed with orchestras such as the Camerata Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and sung for the Dias da Música Festival, Oxford Lieder Festival, BBC Radio 3 In Tune, and Portuguese classical Radio Antena 2.

Alongside operatic world premieres of works like A Canção do Bandido by Nuno Côrte-Real (Teatro Nacional de São Carlos and Teatro Trindade co-production) and Tabacaria and Flores do Mal by Luís Soldado (Inestética), Inês is proud to have sung in Portuguese premieres of operas Onheama by João Guilherme Ripper (Teatro Nacional de São Carlos and Festival Terras Sem Sombra co-production), King Harald’s Saga by Judith Weir, The Waiter’s Revenge by Stephen Oliver, and Hummus by Zad Moultaka.

Following motherhood, Inês' voice has opened up to the possibilities of the spinto soprano repertoire, allowing her to focus more deeply on the Germanic repertoire of composers such as Richard Wagner (the Wesendonck Lieder featuring regularly in her concert appearances), Richard Strauss (with the role of Salome added to her repertoire), and Alban Berg, whose Wozzeck Suite, under the baton of Sian Edwards, launched her Barbican Hall debut.