Juan Diego Florez

The tenor Juan Diego Flórez, who was born in Lima in 1973, comes from a music-loving Peruvian family and emerged at an early age as a singer of folk and pop music. He later had his voice professionally trained at the Conservatorio Nacional in his native city and subsequently went on to study at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia from 1993 to 1996. As a 23-year-old, Flórez made his debut at the Rossini Festival in Pesaro in the summer of 1996, where he performed in Matilde di Shabran and was hailed as a spectacular new discovery. Riccardo Muti then hastened to engage him in Gluck’s Armide for the season opening at La Scala in Milan as well as for Verdi’s Falstaff and Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia. Since then Juan Diego Flórez has been a regular guest at the world’s major opera houses, especially as a performer of bel canto. The tenor has an excellent high range that predestines him for the works of Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini. But he has since expanded his repertoire and also focuses on French repertoire, performing in operas by Bizet, Massenet, and Gounod, as well as singing selected roles by Verdi and Puccini. In the 2022-23 season, he will appear not only as Tonio in Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment at the Vienna Staatsoper and as Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor at La Scala in Milan but also as Rodolfo in Puccini’s La Bohème at London’s Royal Opera House and as the Italian Singer in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier in Vienna. Juan Diego Flórez is also committed to social causes: in 2011 he founded Sinfonía por el Perú, an educational project for disadvantaged children and young people modeled on Venezuela’s El Sistema. He was appointed UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador in 2012. The Vienna Staatsoper has named Flórez, who has won numerous recording awards, a Kammersänger; he received the Crystal Award at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2014 and was named Singer of the Year by Opus Klassik in 2018.

Lucerne Festival debut on 7 September 2017 in a lieder and aria recital, with Vincenzo Scalera accompanyingat the keyboard.

August 2022