Paul Groves

The American tenor Paul Groves, a native of Louisiana who studied at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, launched his career in 1991 as a winner of the Metropolitan Opera’s National Council Auditions. After winning the Richard Tucker Award in 1995, he was invited to appear on the leading international stages: in that year, he made his Salzburg Festival debut as Don Ottavio in the production of Don Giovanni by Patrice Chéreau and Daniel Barenboim, while in 1996 came his debut at La Scala in Milan (as Tamino in The Magic Flute) and at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris (as Tom Rakewell in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress); soon after he performed for the first time at the Vienna and Bavarian Staatsoper companies, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, and the Nederlandse Opera in Amsterdam. Grove has appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in Wagner’s Parsifal, Britten’s Death in Venice, Berlioz’s Les Troyens, and Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles and at Covent Garden in London in such roles as Pylade in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride. In the 2012-13 season Groves sang with Thomas Hampson in Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande; he also performed Berlioz’s Te Deum with the San Francisco Symphony and the title part in Elgar’s oratorio The Dream of Gerontius with the London Philharmonic. On the opera stage he appeared in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide at the Theater an der Wien and as Mozart’s Don Ottavio at the Teatro Real in Madrid. Groves is also a successful interpreter of lieder, as demonstrated by his recitals at Lincoln Center in New York, the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, London’s Wigmore Hall, and La Scala in Milan. He has also recorded the complete songs of Henri Duparc.

LUCERNE FESTIVAL debut on March 2004 in Berlioz’s Grande Messe des Morts, Op. 5, conducted by Sylvain Cambreling.

June 2013