Soprano

Alice Dreier

2001

Alice Dreier is a Swiss soprano and musicologist. After beginning her musical training as a flautist, she studied musicology and Russian literature at the University of Geneva while attending the Conservatoire de Genève’s Pre-College Voice Programme. Since 2023, she has studied voice at the Mozarteum University Salzburg with Christoph Strehl.

Her operatic roles include Zerlina in Don Giovanni, Pamina in Die Zauberflöte, dein Abenteuer, Blanche Aline in Honegger’s Le Roi Pausole, and a Flower Girl in Le nozze di Figaro. In 2025, she performed at Expo 2025 Osaka with the Mozarteum University Symphony Orchestra. Her awards include first prizes at the Geneva Conservatory competition and the Swiss Youth Music Competition, and third prize at the 2025 Vindobona Lied Competition. Her artistic work reflects a particular commitment to chamber music and the promotion of women composers.

I absolutely fell in love when I heard the Meditation. There is something special about her.

Alice Dreier discovered Lūcija Garūta while researching women composers and has since devoted a dedicated project – supported by a university grant – to the composer’s life and work. She has spent time in Riga studying Garūta’s manuscripts, letters and documents, focusing in particular on the composer’s Paris years in the 1920s and her French-language songs. Together with her duo partner she is preparing an immersive concert that pairs Garūta’s songs and solo works with the music and stories that inspired her, alongside plans for recordings and further research—bringing this remarkable composer to audiences who have never heard her music.

Here Alice Dreier explores the correspondence between Lūcija Garūta and a French sculptor she met in Paris in 1926 – a series of tender letters exchanged over several years. Reading them alongside the composer’s own song “My dream,” she traces how a real, unfolding love story is woven into the music: the same imagery of shared dreams that runs through the letters returns, sweet and painful, in Garūta’s writing for voice.

Soprano

Alice Dreier

External resources

A Life in Music Between Riga and Paris

Calendar

Lūcija Garūta: A Life in Music Between Riga and Paris

Alice Dreier; Jou-Yu Shieh

Kleines Studio, Universität Mozarteum

Salzburg, Austria