José Coca Loza

The bass José Coca Loza, who was born in 1989, is a native of Bolivia. He moved to Basel in 2012 to study with Marcel Boone at the Academy of Music there. In 2016 he became a member of the Opera Studio OperAvenir at Theater Basel, where he appeared in Handel’s Alcina, Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue, Verdi’s La traviata, and Strauss’s Elektra. Coca Loza has won prizes in the Quest for the Best (2011, in Tucson, Arizona), Oper Schloss Hallwyl (2014), and Migros Kulturprozent and Concorso Renata Tebaldi (both 2017) competitions. He has attended masterclasses since 2014 with Silvana Bazzoni, the mother and teacher of Cecilia Bartoli, who appeared with him for the first time at Stars & Rising Stars in Munich in 2017 and invited him to take on the role of Haly in Rossini’s L’italiana in Algeri at the Salzburg Whitsun Festival in 2018. He subsequently performed the same role at the Salzburg Summer Festival and at the Opéra de Versailles under Jean-Christophe Spinosi.

July 2018