Since then, the soprano has been discovering a broad repertoire with various orchestras, conductors, operas, and oratorios. She made highly successful debuts with the Berliner Philharmoniker in October 2019 and at the Musikverein Vienna in December 2019. She returned to the Mozartwoche Salzburg in January 2020, this time under Sir András Schiff in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro; in January 2023, she sang in Don Giovanni. In June 2023, she appeared for the first time at La Scala in Milan in Porpora’s Carlo il Calvo. 

In December 2020, Lezhneva made her celebrated debut with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Herbert Blomstedt. In the 2024/25 season, she makes debuts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Atlanta Symphony. 

Orchestras such as the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, the Orquesta Nacional de España, the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, the Kaohsiung Philharmonic, and the Seoul Philharmonic regularly invite Julia Lezhneva, and she regularly works with renowned conductors such as Ádám Fischer, Giovanni Antonini, Herbert Blomstedt, Emmanuelle Haïm, Paavo Järvi, Vladimir Jurowski, and Andrea Marcon. 

Lezhneva’s debut in Handel’s Alcina  (Morgana) at the Hamburg State Opera in September 2018 was celebrated to great acclaim, and she was immediately invited back for Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia and further performances of Alcina. In 2021, she sang the role of Poppea in a new production of Handel’s Agrippina (directed by Barrie Kosky); in 2022, Zerlina in Don Giovanni, and in May 2024, she sang Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro. She made her debut at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona in March 2024 in a staged performance of Handel’s Messiah. 

Born in 1989 into a family of geophysicists on Sakhalin Island off the Pacific Coast of Russia, Julia Lezhneva began playing piano and singing at the age of 5. At 17 she won the Elena Obraztsova Opera Singers Competition and was invited to share the stage with Juan Diego Flórez at the opening of the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro the following year. In 2009, she won first prize at the Mirjam Helin International Singing Competition in Helsinki, and the following year she took first prize at the Paris Opera Competition, as the youngest winner in each competition’s history. Opernwelt magazine named her Young Singer of the Year in 2011 for her debut at La Monnaie in Brussels. The following year she performed at the Victoires de la Musique Classique in Paris. 

Lezhneva’s teachers and mentors include Dennis O’Neill, Yvonne Kenny, Elena Obraztsova, Alberto Zedda, Richard Bonynge, and Thomas Quasthoff.