Canadian soprano Anne Harley is a specialist in baroque music and an avid proponent of contemporary and experimental works. She has premiered, performed and recorded works by Evan Ziporyn, John Adams, Lee Hoiby, Louis Andriessen, Peter Eotvös and John Harbison among others. She performs in North America, Europe and Asia as a recitalist and has appeared as a soloist with Opera Boston (Mme. Mao in Nixon in China), The American Repertory Theatre (Oedipus), The Handel & Haydn Society, Boston Camerata, the Banff Centre for the Arts (Alberta, Canada), the North Carolina Symphony and at the Tanglewood Festival. The Boston Globe acclaimed her performance as Harper Pitt in BMOP’s American premičre of Peter Eotvös's Angels in America as “vocally and dramatically outstanding.” In 2004, she garnered unanimous praise for her performance in the role of Madame Mao in Nixon in China with Opera Boston and Musical America praised her performance in Chen Shi Zheng's revelatory 2005 production of Dido and Aeneas with the Handel and Haydn Society.

She is extremely interested in interdisciplinary projects, especially those that incorporate new media in the service of music and drama. The Village Voice described her performance in Borrowed Light at BAM's Next Wave with the Finnish Tero Saarinen Dance Company and the Boston Camerata as transmitting a “heart-wrenching purity.” In 2009-10, she performed the lead role of Margaret Mead in the world and US premičres of Evan Ziporyn’s A House in Bali with Bang-On-A-Can in Bali, Boston and New York (BAM). Her latest project, VoicesOfThePearl, commissions artists and composers to create song cycles and multimedia pieces to texts by and about female mystical experience from traditions around the world.

She performs and records many of the standard works of Bach, Handel, Rameau and Charpentier, as well as the music of lesser known Russian women composers from the eighteenth century: Kurakina, Dashkova, and Golovina. She débuted in Europe at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw as the lead in Handel’s Acis and Galatea and created leading roles in the modern-day premičre of Royer’s Le pouvoir de l’Amour in conjunction with the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles.

Dr. Harley obtained the doctorate in Historical Performance at Boston University, where she continued her research into Russian baroque music. She is codirector of Russian early music ensemble,TALISMAN, which won the Noah Greenberg Award in 2001 and released its first CD on Dorian to acclaim in Gramophone and EMA: Roses d’Amour: Music of Russian Princesses from the Court of Catherine the Great. Their second album, Stesha: Russian Gypsy Diva of the 1820s (Naxos), reconstructs repertoire from the Russian Gypsy and bel canto tradition in 1820s Moscow. They have since released several more recordings of early Russian and Russian Roma (Gypsy) music with major labels.

Her solo performances are available on Hänssler Profil, Naxos, Sony Classics, Dorian,Canteloupe, Musica Omnia and BMOP/sound.