Elisabete Matos
Maria Elisabete da Silva Duarte Matos (born 6 September 1964) is a Portuguese soprano and politician. In January 1922 she was elected to the Portuguese Assembly of the Republic as a member of the Socialist Party, representing the Braga constituency. Biography. Elisabete Matos was born in 1964 in Caldas das Taipas, Guimarães, Portugal and she began her first musical studies in at the Conservatório de Música Calouste Gulbenkian de Braga. Firstly she started to study violin and then singing, alongside. After she finished the Conservatory, Matos won a scholarship from the renowned Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation which allowed her  to finish her studies in Madrid, Spain. A second place in a European Singing Contest made her be noticed and her international career was launched by the roles of Donna Elvira in Mozart's opera "Don Giovanni" and Alice Ford from Verdi's "Falstaff" at the Hamburg Opera. Shortly after that, in the year of 1997, she made a triumphal debut in Madrid at the reopening of the Teatro Real as an opera house, interpreting the leading role of Marigaila in the opening of "Divinas Palabras", by Antón García Abril, with Plácido Domingo in the tenor part. Her performance impressed  him very much and he invited her to sing with him Massenet's "Le Cid" (Chimène) and Dolly from "Sly", by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari with José Carreras. After all these successes, Elisabete Matos has sung in many major opera houses around the world, like the Gran Teatre del Liceu, La Fenice, Teatro Nacional de São Carlos (Lisbon), Teatro Real, La Scala, Maestranza de Sevilla, Teatro Regio di Torino and the Teatro di San Carlo (Naples). She has made appearances too at the Macerata Festival and the Mérida Festival, Japan, Washington, Chicago and all around Spain. In 2001, Matos participated in  the commemorations of the centenary of Giuseppe Verdi's death, singing again with Plácido Domingo, José Carreras and other names, under the musical direction of Zubin Mehta, in Rome. In January 2009 she sang the title role of "La Gioconda" in Tokyo for the Fujiwara Opera. Elisabete Matos portrayed Minnie in two performances of Puccini's "La Fanciulla del West" at the Metropolitan Opera during the 2010–2011 season. In 2019 it was announced that Matos would become the artistic director of Lisbon's Teatro Nacional de São Carlos. Repertory. A "lirico-spinto" soprano, Elisabete Matos owns a large voice capable  of a dramatic intensity with a timbre of sheer beauty. Her most performed composers are Puccini and Wagner, but she has also sung the works of many others, counting more than fifty roles in her repertory.