Known for her versatility, Jane Thorngren’s performance experience ranges from Early Music to new works by contemporary composers. After beginning her performing career at the early age of 3 1/2 in her hometown of Pilot Mound, Iowa, and along the way receiving degrees in music from Drake University and the University of Southern California, she is now equally at home on opera, operetta and concert stages around the world.

In the United States, this distinguished soprano made her New York debut at the Metropolitan Opera House with Covent Garden’s Royal Ballet as soprano soloist in Poulenc’s Gloria. With the New York City Opera she appeared to wide critical acclaim in two PBS Live from Lincoln Center telecasts: in the title role of Lehar’s The Merry Widow (for which she was awarded NYCO’s Diva Award) and as Musetta in the Emmy-winning La Bohème. New York audiences have also heard her at Lincoln Center’s other venues, Avery Fisher Hall with The Mostly Mozart Festival (in Handel’s Mitridate and Hadyn’s Creation) and Alice Tully Hall (as Fifi in The Little Orchestra Society of New York’s production of Victor Herbert’s Mademoiselle Modiste and in a concert of Vivaldi’s Muses), as well as at Carnegie Hall with the New York Choral Arts Society and in performances of Rutter’s Magnificat and Hadyn’s Lord Nelson Mass. She has brought her portrayals of Violetta, Mimi, Manon, Marguerite, Juliette, Olympia/Antonia/Giulietta, The Countess, Micaela, Donna Elvira, Liu, Fiordiligi, The Governess, Gilda, Pamina and Roselinda to national opera companies including Minnesota, Forth Worth, Palm Beach, Portland, Baltimore, Columbus, Hawaii, Orlando, Florentine Opera of Milwaukee, Michigan Opera, and the Canadian companies of Edmonton and Calgary.

In North America, her orchestral engagements have included the symphony orchestras of Pittsburgh, Seattle, Phoenix, Hartford, Savannah, Colorado, Vermont, Alabama, Toronto and Ottawa, as well as the chamber orchestras of Los Angeles, New York, Cleveland, Stamford and Pasadena in repertoire by Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Hadyn, Mahler, Mozart, Strauss, Grieg, Orff and Barber. She is also a frequent guest in evenings of Viennese operetta highlights.

Special invitations have brought her to the Waterloo Festival in New Jersey, The Oregon Bach Festival, and for several seasons to the Crested Butte Music Festival in Colorado. She has appeared at the Hartford Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in programs coordinated with featured collections and has appeared in New York at the Algonquin’s famous Oak Room in evenings of song.

Ms. Thorngren’s South American concert tours have taken her to Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Bolivia, and she has performed a large repertoire of opera (Die Zauberflöte, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, La Bohème, Don Giovanni, La Traviata, Faust) and concert pieces over several seasons at the Festival de Musique Saint-Barthélemy in the French West Indies.

The singer’s three years as principal soprano with the Mainz Opera in Germany (singing the roles of Violetta, Fiordiligi, Euridice, Rosalinda, Saffi, Marguerite, Manon and Jenny in Aufstief und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny) set the stage for many European engagements including the Paris Opera, the Hamburg Carmen 2000 Festival, The Messiah with the Netherlands Handel Society at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Handel’s Samson and Israel in Egypt with Philharmonischer Chor Köln and the Gürzenich Orchestra, Handel’s Belshazzar with the Düsseldorf Symphony and on tours in The Netherlands (with the Philips’ Philharmonisch Koor) and in France (with the Orchestre Baroque de Luneville) of Bach’s St. John and St. Matthew Passions.

Jane Thorngren has also appeared extensively in Asia where engagements have taken her to Hong Kong with the Hong Kong Philharmonic as Roselinda in Die Fledermaus, on tour with the Deutsche Philharmonica Hungarica throughout Japan in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as well as other concerts tours to Japan, The Philippines, Taiwan, Korea, Indonesia, China, Singapore and Fiji.

With the release of her new CD, This and My Heart, she returns to one of her first loves, art song literature. Song recitals have taken her to New York, California and Iowa in recent months, as well as to Aspen’s Harris Hall and Seattle’s new Benaroya Recital Hall.

Ms. Thorngren can be heard on the RCM recording Northwest Journey by composer Morten Lauridsen and on Mantra by composer Somei Satoh (New Albion Records).