Tsakane Valentine Maswanganyi (born 14 February 1979) is a South African classical soprano. She first came to public notice as a member of the opera band Amici Forever.
Early life
Maswanganyi was born and grew up in a township in Soweto, where she lived with her grandparents for the first eight years of her life. Her grandmother worked as a schoolteacher and her grandfather was a priest. At that time South Africa was still segregated under the laws of apartheid. Maswanganyi stated of that experience, "I'd say my family had the middle-class black person's life in Soweto – which is different from the middle-class person's life in the white community. Soweto has a different spirit. There used to be shootings, but I didn't experience that directly. Sometimes the army would come by in cars and let off tear gas. We'd be playing in the garden and suddenly you'd have to get inside and lock the doors. Sometimes the police would come and start knocking and bashing doors in for no reason. In those days, people were not allowed to have visitors – even your cousins or family – you'd have to have some kind of permission to have people visit you." Some of her operatic roles are Musetta (La bohème), Valencienne (The Merry Widow), Amelia (Amelia al Ballo), Arminda (La finta giardiniera) and Contessa Ceprano (Rigoletto). Some highlights of her career include the title role in Carmen Jones with the London Philharmonic at Royal Festival Hall and Bess in Porgy and Bess at the Cape Town Opera, Deutsche Oper Berlin, and Norwegian National Opera. In April 2011, she portrayed the title role in the world premiere of Bongani Ndodana-Breen's Winnie: The Opera at the State Theatre in Pretoria.
As of 2011, Maswanganyi resides in Italy where she is a voice student of mezzo-soprano Nadiya Petrenko.