XIAOYU LI

The Chinese soprano Xiaoyu Li is a student at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin, where she studies with Professor Dr. Ewa Wolak. Her voice, which lies between a lyric and dramatic soprano, is developing towards the spinto repertoire. She has performed roles including Elettra (Idomeneo), Tytania, Cleopatra, Mimì, Pamina, Liù, and Woglinde in Wagner’s Das Rheingold (2025). In 2024, she was a finalist in the Belvedere Competition and reached round two of Neue Stimmen. She also won First Prize at the 2016 Hong Kong International Music Festival. Her experience includes concert, stage, and radio performances.

This program combines masterpieces from the Italian and French operatic repertoires. The first round features two arias of great pathos: Mimì in “Donde lieta uscì” bids a farewell to Rodolfo with dignity, a moment dictated by her illness; this is followed by Micaela’s aria “Je dis que rien ne m’épouvante,” in which the young woman, though frightened, finds the courage to enter a mountain hideout of smugglers in search of her beloved Don José. The semifinal moves between Dvořák’s romanticism and Mozart’s classicism. Rusalka’s “Song to the Moon” expresses the water nymph’s longing to become human for love, a moment of great lyricism and poignant beauty. The program concludes with Elettra’s aria, “Oh smania! oh furie!,” where the princess gives in to a desperate outburst of rage after her hopes for love are shattered by fate.