Iwona Sobotka
Iwona Sobotka gained international recognition as the Grand Prize winner of the Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition in Belgium (2004). She has also been honoured with First Prize at the Edmund Kossowski Polish Art Song Competition in Warsaw and the East and West International Artists Auditions in New York.
The artist works with outstanding conductors and renowned symphony orchestras. Recently, she took part in the performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Messa da Requiem under the baton of Riccardo Muti with Orchestre National de France and The Philadelphia Orchestra, Leoš Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass with Czech Philharmonic under Sir Simon Rattle, and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 under Semyon Bychkov. She has also performed with orchestras such as Berliner Philharmoniker, London Symphony Orchestra, Staatskapelle Berlin, Wiener Symphoniker, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg as well as with main orchestras in Poland.
She is an acclaimed performer of the Polish vocal repertoire. Her debut album of songs by Karol Szymanowski (Channel Classics, 2004) won the Fryderyk Award. She has also recorded Szymanowski’s works with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra for EMI Classics and with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra in Katowice and the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic for Polish Radio.
Iwona Sobotka’s operatic repertoire includes more than 30 roles, which she has presented on world stages, including the Opéra National de Paris, Teatro Real in Madrid, Chicago Opera Theater, Komische Oper Berlin, Teatr Wielki – Polish National Opera in Warsaw, as well as at the Osterfestspiele Baden‑Baden and the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival. In 2024, she won the Jan Kiepura Theatre Music Award in the Best Opera Singer category for the role of Desdemona in Verdi’s Otello, which she sang on the stage of the Grand Theatre in Poznań.
She is a graduate of the Fryderyk Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw (now the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music) and of the Escuela Superior de Música Reina Sofía in Madrid, where she studied under Tom Krause.
[2024]