Vanessa in her own words

Vanessa Guinadi is a Singaporean-Indonesian soprano known for her imaginative voice, deep musical instinct and daring theatrical embodiment. Praised for her “impressive voice” (NRC) and “beautiful combination of singing and acting” (Theaterkrant), Vanessa has a wide appetite for all that opera and performance has to offer. 

Vanessa debuted professionally as a singer and performer at age 9 in the children’s choir of the Singapore Lyric Opera as a hungry villager in John Rutter’s The Reluctant Dragon. She found something invigorating about miming guzzling, munching and gobbling while counting to 4.

After a winding journey through School of the Arts Singapore, the Royal Northern College of Music Manchester and the Royal Conservatoire The Hague, she is still chasing that same high.

Her repertoire spans from repertory roles to new creations. She premiered the role of Poes (Mispoes) with Holland Opera, after reimagining Purcell's The Fairy Queen with them as part of the Ensemble (Midsummer Nightmare). She interpreted the roles of Zerlina (Don Giovanni) in the Koninklijk Conservatorium Den Haag, and Ninetta (La finta semplice) and 1st Wood Sprite (Rusalka) in RNCM. She will soon sing the role of Marianne in her debut with Opera Spanga in Der Rosenkavalier.

In contemporary music-theater, she treads across Europe from Muziektheater Transparant (BE) in Aïda Gabriëls’ “Passages” to the Opera Forward Festival LAB by the Dutch National Opera (NL), to combining contemporary dance and choral music with CHOREOS (DE), amongst others.

On the concert stage, she has collaborated with a wide range of ensembles in search of a musical homebase, from lutesong in St. Martin-in-the-Fields, to Weimar Republic cabaret in a dingy pub in Battersea with the Zephyr Collective, to world premieres with Orkest de Ereprijs. Her conclusion is that the greedy feasting need not stop at musical eras or disciplines.

The artistic bacchanalia extends as a maker. Vanessa creates immersive polyphonic experiences in museums across the Netherlands as performer and co-producer of Ensemble CIRCE, creating live experiences in the Kröller-Möller Museum to Museum De Pont. She also makes her own solo interdisciplinary performances, researching movement creation from vocal impulses.

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