Paul Whelan

Bass

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  Bass-baritone Paul Whelan begins the 2012-13 Season with his return to Opera Australia as Ramfis Aida, followed by performances as Jesus in Opera Queensland’s staged production of St Matthew Passion. He travels to New Zealand for Talbot Maria Stuarda with Wellington Opera, and performs pieces by Adams and Psathas in concert with New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. Mr Whelan rounds out the season with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra in an all-Wagner programme under the baton of Vasily Petrenko.

  Recent successes include Seneca in a new production of L’Incoronazione di Poppea in Lille, Dijon and at Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Theseus in the new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for English National Opera, Beethoven’s Mass in C at Grant Park Music Festival in Chicago, Collatinus The Rape of Lucretia for Opera Norway as well as Bach’s St. Matthew Passion for the Leeds International Concert Season. He also appeared at Glyndebourne in two other roles: Claggart in their new production of Billy Budd, and Alidoro La Cenerentola. He sang his first Wotan in Das Rheingold with the Auckland Philharmonic to critical acclaim.

  Other notable opera engagements include the title role in Bluebeard’s Castle with NBR Opera New Zealand; Four Villains Les Contes d’Hoffmann at Southern Opera; Argante in Handel’s Rinaldo in Munich; Apollon in Gluck’s Alceste at the Dresden Festival; a staged production of Bach’s St John Passion (directed by Deborah Warner), Schaunard in a new production of Leoncavallo’s La bohème, Raimondo Lucia di Lammermoor all at English National Opera; Escamillo Carmen at Welsh National Opera; and Harry Joy Bliss at Hamburg State Opera and world premieres of The Assassin Tree by Stuart MacRae in a joint production with the Royal Opera House and the Edinburgh Festival, and Bird of Night by Dominique Legendre, also for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. 

  Concert appearances include Stanford’s Songs of the Fleet with Ulster Orchestra, Mountararat in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe with San Francisco Symphony, The Dream of Gerontius (Priest and Angel of Agony) which he sang at Grant Park Music Festival in Chicago, in Berlin, Salisbury and in New Zealand;  the bass soloist in Mozart’s Coronation Mass with Eugene Symphony Orchestra; a return to the London Bach choir for St Matthew’s Passion at the Festival Hall; the world premiere of Terra Incognita, a symphonic cantata for bass soloist and choir written for the artist by Gareth Farr and performed by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

  Other orchestral engagements include St. Matthew Passion with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and London Bach Choir, Judas The Apostles at Leeds Festival, Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death with the Ulster Orchestra recorded for BBC Radio 3; Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast with the Orquesta Sinfonica de Madrid (broadcast live), a series of concerts with Sir Charles Mackerras and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra; Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, Delius’s Sea Drift in Osaka, Valens in Handel’s Theodora with Scottish Chamber Orchestra, also presented in Winterthur, Switzerland.

  Conductors with whom he has collaborated include Sir Simon Rattle, Kent Nagano, Richard Hickox, Yehudi Menuhin, Valery Gergiev, Gary Bertini, and Vassily Sinaisky; he has given recitals at Wigmore Hall, The Purcell Room, Cardiff’s St David’s Hall, Cheltenham Festival, BBC Pebble Mill, Perth Festival and at the Chátelet Theatre in Paris.

  Recordings include A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Colin Davis (Philips), Kurt Weill’s Silber See under Markus Stenz (BMG); recordings with the BBC Philharmonic for Chandos and with the BBC Scottish Symphony for Hyperion.

  Future engagements include Giorgio I Puritani at Boston Lyric Opera.

  Paul Whelan is represented worldwide by Deborah Sanders at Rayfield Allied.
  This biography is for information only and should not be reproduced.

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