Margherita Maria Sala is the First Prize winner of the Cesti International Singing Competition 2020 where she also received the Audience Award and the Special Prize from the Festival Resonanzen at the Vienna Konzerthaus.
Born in Lecco, Margherita began her musical education as a child under the guidance of her parents, both musicians. Besides early training in violin, she studied singing in the polyphonic vocal group “Famiglia Sala” composed of the seven members of her own family.
In 2017 she graduated in Choral Conducting from the Accademia Biennale di Formazione per Direttori di Coro in Bellinzona under the guidance of Marco Berrini.
On the occasion of the 105th death anniversary of Jules Bugmein, she performed and recorded the world premiere of his comic opera La Secchia rapita led by Aldo Salvagno at the Auditorium Verdi in Milan; this was issued on CD by Dynamic.
More recently, Riccardo Muti has invited Margherita Maria Sala to sing Vivaldi’s Magnificat with his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra in Lourdes and Loreto.
She made her Théâtre des Champs-Elysées debut in 2021 with Handel’s Oreste alongside Franco Fagioli and under the baton of Maxim Emelyanychev and has since returned to sing Bradamante in Vivaldi’s Orlando furioso and Aristea in L’Olimpiade by the same composer, both with Jean-Christophe Spinosi.
Margherita is a regular guest of the Innsbrucker Festwochen der Alten Musik where she sang, with the complicity of Alessandro De Marchi, Pasquini’s Idalma, the Italian version of Handel’s Messiah and Vivaldi’s Olimpiade she also performed for the Theater an der Wien and for the Moscow Tchaikovsky Concert Hall under Federico Maria Sardelli.
Other past highlights include Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di anima et di corpo (Piacere) in a Giovanni Antonini/Robert Carsen production at Theater an der Wien and Monteverdi’s Orfeo (Speranza) in an Ottavio Dantone/Pier Luigi Pizzi production at Ravenna Teatro Alighieri.
Margherita Maria Sala has further appeared in concert, singing Messiah conducted by Franco Fagioli in Versailles and Barcelona, La Resurrezione (Cleofe) with Concerto Copenhagen for the Wiener Konzerthaus and Aci, Galatea e Polifemo (Galatea) for the Handel Festival in Halle.
Recent and future engagements include Handel’s Agrippina (Narciso) at La Seine Musicale in Paris under Ottavio Dantone, Vivaldi’s Olimpiade (Aristea) with Jean-Christophe Spinosi at Opéra de Nice and Handel’s Aci, Galatea e Polifemo (Galatea) under Francesco Corti in Montréal.
Margherita will appear in concert with Gianluca Capuano at the Festival Bach de Lausanne, with Enrico Onofri in Clermont-Ferrand and Vichy, and with Giulio Prandi at Musikgebouw Amsterdam, Bruxelles Bozar and deSingel in Antwerp.
