Richard Croft
American tenor RICHARD CROFT is internationally renowned for his performances with leading opera companies and orchestras around the world, including the Metropolitan Opera, the Salzburg Festival, the Opéra National de Paris, the Berlin Staatsoper, Opera Zurich, the Glyndebourne Festival, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic. His clarion voice, superlative musicianship, and commanding stage presence allow him to pursue a wide breadth of repertoire from Handel and Mozart to the music of today's composers.
The 2011/2012 season sees Richard Croft returning to the Met for an encore engagement of their visually extravagant production of Philip Glass' landmark 1980 opera Satyagraha, in the role of Gandhi, which will also be broadcast live in HD to movie theaters around the world. Croft continues the operatic season with the Bayerische Staatsoper, where he will play the title role in Mitridate under Ivor Bolton. He began the concert season with two performances of Messiah with the Minnesota Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, and continues with these performances of Beethoven's Missa solemnis with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and then with the Berliner Philharmonker conducted by Herbert Blomstedt.
Highlight's of Croft's recent seasons include his Met performance of the role of Loge in Wagner's Das Rheingold, conducted by James Levine; his much-anticipated 2009 debut at La Scala in Idomeneo under the baton of Myung-Whun Chung, in a production by Luc Bondy; a European tour and recording with Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre, featuring musical odes to Saint Cecilia by Purcell, Haydn, and Handel, a staged version of Handel's Messiah for the Theater an der Wien; and Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 with Leonard Slatkin and the National Symphony. He has also performed Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte at the University of North Texas, where he has been Professor of Voice since 2004.
Croft debuted with the Cleveland Orchestra as Pelléas in Pelléas et Mélisande in concert performances led by Pierre Boulez. He made his Carnegie Hall début under Sir Neville Marriner in Mozart's Requiem, his St. Louis Symphony début with Nicholas McGegan in Britten's Serenade, and his Boston Symphony Orchestra debut in Mozart's Requiem with Bernard Haitink.
Croft has been twice Grammy-nominated; he has recorded for Deutsche Grammophon Archiv, Harmonia Mundi, Erato, and Philips Classics. He sang the title role in the recently released and critically acclaimed recording of Mozart's Mitridate from the Salzburg Festival.
For more information, please visit richardcroft.net.