Miwako Handa graduated from Toho Gakuen College and completed the graduate course of the same college. She won the highest prize and the Sizuko Kawasaki Prize when she completed a course at Nikikai Opera Studio. She also won the First Prize and the Fukunaga Prize at the Fujisawa Opera Competition. Handa made her opera debut performing Susanna (Le Nozze di Figaro) with Nikikai. She received high praise for roles including Donna Rosita in Il Linguaggio Dei Fiori and Nanetta in Falstaff at the New National Theatre in Tokyo, and Lidoine in Dialogue des Carmélites. She also performed the difficult role of Hanako in Toshio Hosokawa’s opera Hanjo (from the original drama written by Yukio Mishima, English translation by Donald Keene) in the opera’s Japan premiere. Her interpretation was lauded by the composer as the closest to his image of Hanako. Following three successful performances in Tokyo, she was invited to the MITO Festival Italy to perform the same role in Turin and Milan, and was highly praised.
In 2012 Handa also performed in the new production of the opera with Seinen-dan directed by Oriza Hirata, receiving high critical accliam once again. In the same year, she released her first album, Khôra-Niemandslied, which was chosen by music magazines as “most recommended CD.” As a concert soloist she was selected to perform in Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night's Dream with the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony conducted by Gary Bertini. She went on to perform in numerous concerts with renowned conductors inside and outside Japan, including Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand (Bertini/Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony), Mozart’s Mass in C minor (Blomstedt/NHK Symphony), Mozart’s Requiem (Honeck/Yomiuri Nippon Symphony), and again in Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night's Dream (Märkl/NHK Symphony). Handa also appeared in Symphony of a Thousand in the regular concert of the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra announcing the inauguration of Eliahu Inbal as principal conductor. She again appeared in regular concerts of the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony conducted by Inbal in 2009, in performances of Ravel’s Shéhérazade and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. In 2014, Handa performed in New York with the New York-based orchestra group Perspectives Ensemble on their invitation, receiving high praise.
Handa has carried out multi-faceted activities including music production for the film Nodame Cantabile and for Gekidan Shinkansen theatre company, as well as collaboration in Rakugo and Songs. In 2014, she took part as a vocalist in Return to the Inner Voice, an album by leading Japanese progressive band KENSO, and appeared in the band’s 40th anniversary live show at Club Citta’. (April 2016)
