Born in Argentina from Danish descendents, María Cristina Kiehr moved to Europe to study with René Jacobs at the Schola Cantorum in Basel, where she still resides.
She has enjoyed particularly prolific recording and concert activities, performing worldwide with most of the prestigious conductors on the baroque scene and their associated orchestras, for example: Frans Brüggen with the Orchestra of the XVIIIth Century, Jordi Savall and Hesperion XX, René Jacobs and Concerto Vocale, Robert King with The King's Consort, Chiara Banchini and Ensemble 415, Christophe Coin with the Ensemble Baroque de Limoges, Philippe Herreweghe, Gustav Leonhardt and Nikolaus Harnoncourt with both the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and Concentus Musicus. She toured Australia with the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and has been invited to sing with the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin (for the BBC PROMS), Il Fondamento, the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, the Helsinki Baroque Orchestra, Netherlands Bach Society, La Fenice and the Gulbenkian Orchestra.
Among her numerous recordings, her beautiful rendition of Maddalena in Caldara's Maddalena ai Piedi di Cristo for Harmonia Mundi under the baton of René Jacobs won her a Gramophone award in 1997.
She has formed Concerto Soave, with harpsichordist Jean-Marc Aymes, which mainly performs early XVIIth-century Italian music. Their recordings for Harmonia Mundi – Monteverdi's Pianto della Madonna, Canta la Maddalena, Scarlatti's Cantatas, Sigismondo d'India's Madrigali e Canzonette and recently released, Monteverdi's Il Ballo della Ninfa Scherzi Musicali recorded with Stephan MacLeod (bass) – received with great critical acclaim. The ensemble regularly appears in the most prestigious festivals (Fribourg, Ambronay, Flanders, Wallonie, Lufthansa in London, Utrecht, Aranjuez and Misteria Paschalia in Krakow) and venues (De Bijloke, Gent; Philharmonie, Brussels; WDR, Cologne; South Bank, London). She was also, until recently, a member of the vocal quartet La Colombina, which she co-founded.
In Opera, her repertoire encompasses works by Monteverdi (L'Incoronazione di Poppea, Orfeo, Il Ritorno di Ulisse, in which she sang the role of Fortuna in the Berlin Staatsoper production in February 2005), Telemann (Orpheus), Purcell (Dido and Eneas), Blow (Venus y Adonis), Gluck (Orphée et Euridice), Vivaldi (Dorilla in Tempe), Cavalli (Giasone), Cesti (L'Orontea), and Haydn (Orlando Palladino); she has also recorded most of these works.
One of Maria Cristina Kiehr's fundamental artistic aims is to discover and re-create lost or unknown scores. Consequently, she has world-premiered works by Giovanni Felice Sances, Fanny Hensel and by the living composer Alexander Müllenbach.
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