Grammy Award® winner Ana María Martínez is considered to be one of the foremost sopranos of her time, with an international career that spans the world’s most important opera houses and concert halls. Her repertoire encompasses opera’s most intriguing and diverse leading ladies, and she engages her audiences season after season with signature roles, spellbinding debuts, and a myriad of captivating recordings.Recent rave reviews for the soprano include the following:
“Her soprano harks back to the golden age. Her range is even, from a dusky chest-voice through a claret-colored middle and up to radiant top, and is impressive in its quiet moments as it is at full power.” (Opera News, Cover Story)
“The production was grounded by the exquisite performance of the title role by Ana María Martínez, who sang the opera for Glyndebourne in 2009. The soprano was in ravishing vocal estate, offering reams of floated lyricism in Act I's famous song to the moon, as well as prodigious dynamic control in "Ó marno to je" and power in reserve for the climaxes of "Necitelná vodní moci….Martínez's achievement was easily one of the great soprano performances of the present era at Lyric.” (Opera News, Rusalka, Lyric Opera of Chicago)
“Martínez’s voice alone - with its chocolate-rich vibrancy in the low and middle range and its thrilling brilliance at the top - is worth the price of admission, but she also has the expressive range, as a singing actress, to portray Marguerite's complex transformation from youthful innocent in the throes of first love to outcast sinner consumed by tragedy and madness, who then achieves the miracle of redemption.” (Opera News, Faust, Houston Grand Opera)
“It was a bit of theatrical magic in a beautiful performance: modest and delicate, yet rising to glimpses of the epic in her final aria of self-sacrifice.” (The New York Times, Madama Butterfly, The Metropolitan Opera)
Ms. Martínez is constantly challenging and stretching herself as an artist. In addition to a full calendar of performances, she has recently taken on two new exciting roles that expand her presence offstage, including joining Houston Grand Opera as their first-ever Artistic Advisor as well as Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music as Artist-in-Residence for the 2019-20 and 2020-21 academic years. Equally interesting, she voiced the role of opera singer Alessandra in season three of Amazon’s Mozart in the Jungle, and proudly represented her birthplace Puerto Rico as an honoree and performer in the 62nd Annual National Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City. During her travels she frequently goes into the classroom to teach and offer guidance to students, has provided candid encouragement to young singers as a contributing editor to Classical Singer Magazine and her reflections were profiled in Latino Wisdom: Celebrity Stories of Hope, Inspiration, and Success to Recharge our Mind, Body, and Soul by Cathy Areu, published by Barricade Books.