Gerald Finley

The Canadian baritone Gerald Finley began his musical career as a choirboy at St. Matthew’s Church in Ottawa and later studied voice at the Royal College of Music as well as at King’s College in Cambridge. He acquired his earliest stage experiences at the Opera Studio of English National Opera. For his debut at the Glyndebourne Festival as Sid in Britten’s Albert Herring he received the John Christie Award in 1988. Finley’s international reputation is based above all on his accomplishments as a Mozart performer. He has sung Don Giovanni at such houses as the Metropolitan Opera in New York and Covent Garden in London and in Paris, Vienna, and Munich; he has also performed the Count in Figaro at the Salzburg Festival and in Amsterdam. Finley is additionally devoted to the repertoire of the 19th and 20th centuries, performing such roles as Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Frank and Fritz in Korngold’s Die tote Stadt, Golaud in Debussy’s Pelléas, and Captain Balstrode in Britten’s Peter Grimes. He took on one of the most dramatic challenges of his voice type when he portrayed Hans Sachs in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger at the Glyndebourne Festival in 2011. Finley has also participated in several world premieres, including Mark Anthony Turnage’s The Silver Tassie, Tobias Picker’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin, and John Adams’s Doctor Atomic, the DVD of which received a Grammy Award. In the summer of 2013 he performs Don Alfonso in Mozart’s Così fan tutte at the Salzburg Festival, and in the 2013-14 season he will appear in Wagner’s Parsifal and Mozart’s Figaro at Covent Garden and in Janácek’s The Cunning Little Vixen at the Vienna Staatsoper. Gerald Finley regularly performs lieder recitals; in 2008, 2009, and 2011, his lieder recordings garnered the Gramophone Award.

LUCERNE FESTIVAL debut on 2 April 2009 in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony conducted by Bernard Haitink.

June 2013