Richard Wiegold – Bass

Born in Caerphilly, South Wales, true bass Richard Wiegold was a professional cellist for nearly ten years before training as a singer at the Royal Northern College of Music. Praised by Opera News for his ‘cavernous bass and palpable acting‘, and by Bachtrack for his ‘glorious, stentorian voice‘, he has had an international career in concert and opera since the mid-2000s, singing with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Cincinnati Symphony, La Real Filharmonía de Galicia, the Royal Philharmonic, the Netherlands Radio Symphony, the Hallé and other leading orchestras, and at venues including the Royal Albert Hall, Royal Festival Hall, Cadogan Hall, Bridgewater Hall, and Birmingham Symphony Hall. Alongside the all standard bass concert repertoire, Richard has appeared as the narrator in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and Walton’s Façade, and given numerous recital premieres, including Mervyn Burtch’s Light and Dark and Ozymandias, Panayiotis Demopoulos’s Three Songs for Bass and Peter Reynolds’s Rumi Songs.

Richard‘s debut at the Canadian Opera in 2008, singing Arkel Pelléas et Mélisande, has led to a career across North and Central America, Europe and the Middle and Far East. He first appeared at Covent Garden in 2009, as Dr Grenvil La Traviata opposite Renée Fleming, a DVD of which was nominated for a Grammy. Richard is closely associated with the role of Il Commendatore Don Giovanni, which he has sung for Canadian Opera, Lyric Opera of Kansas City, Utah Opera, Teatru Manoel and the Znojmo Festival, amongst others ; he also voiced it for the 2017 film Interlude in Prague starring Aneurin Barnard and James Purefoy. Richard‘s repertoire also includes many Wagnerian roles, amongst them Gurnemanz Parsifal with Estonian National Opera, Hans Schwarz Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg at Covent Garden and the Berliner Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Fasolt Rheingold for North Carolina Opera, Reinmar von Zweter Tannhäuser for the Lyric Opera of Chicago and Le Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse, Koenig Marke Tristan und Isolde with the Prague State Opera and North Carolina Opera, Titurel Parsifal and Veit Pogner Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg with Saffron Opera Group, Daland Der Fliegende Hollaender with Vancouver Opera, La Real Filharmonía de Galicia and other companies, and Stefano Colonna Rienzi, also in Toulouse, which was released on a critically-acclaimed DVD. Other roles include Arkel at Glyndebourne and with the Cincinnati Symphony, Fünfter Jude Salome at the Salzburg Festival under Sir Simon Rattle, Zweiter Soldat/Fünfter Jude/Erster Nazarener Salome at the Verbier Festival under Valery Gergiev, Timur Turandot for Utah Opera, Banquo Macbeth for Palm Beach Opera, Theseus A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Montpellier,  Zweiter geharnischte Mann Die Zauberflöte in Valencia, and Dr. Bartolo Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Basilio Il Barbiere di Siviglia for Welsh National Opera.

For more information including recordings please visit: www.richardwiegold.com