The Polish star tenor Piotr Beczała takes on the Lohengrin in this year’s opening premiere of the Bayreuth Festival. Piotr Beczała is a regular, celebrated guest at all the major stages worldwide. In 2016, he debuted as the acclaimed Lohengrin in Dresden, also under the baton of Christian Thielemann.
The Bayreuth Festival thanks all institutions who, through their generous support and short-term cooperation, made Piotr Beczała’s participation in the Bayreuth Festival possible, especially the Tanglewood Music Festival.
Piotr Beczała
Photo (c) Jean-Baptiste Millot
Celebrated by audiences and critics alike, Piotr Beczała is one of the most sought-after tenors of our time and a regular guest at the most important opera houses worldwide.
Piotr Beczała opens the 17/18 season as Riccardo in Un Ballo in Maschera at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, before returning as Maurizio (Adriana Lecouvreur) to the Vienna State Opera, as Edgardo (Lucia di Lammermoor) to the Munich State Opera, and as Rodolfo (La Bohème) to the Staatsoper Unter den Linden. Further highlights of the season include Carmen at the Vienna State Opera, Luisa Miller (Rodolfo) at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Werther at the Opernhaus Zürich, as well as the revival of Franz Lehár’s The Land of Smiles as Prince Sou-Chong. Furthermore, Piotr Beczała can be heard in recitals in New York, Chicago, Paris, Munich, and Schwarzenberg, among other places. Since his debut as Duca in 2006, Piotr Beczala has been a regular guest at the Metropolitan Opera. Here he has since sung Lenski (Eugene Onegin), Prince (Rusalka), Edgardo (Lucia di Lammermoor), Rodolfo (La Bohème), Vaudémont (Iolanta), Riccardo, as well as the title roles in Roméo et Juliette and Faust. In 2011, he accompanied the Met to Japan and in 2012 made his role debut as des Grieux in Massenet’s Manon.
The tenor can also be regularly seen at the State Operas in Munich and Vienna, as well as La Scala in Milan. At the Munich Festival, he was last heard as Riccardo, and in Vienna, among others. Piotr Beczała has also performed as a guest at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, the Gran Teatre del Liceu, the San Francisco Opera, the Nederlandse Opera, the Théâtre de la Monnaie Brussels, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, the Grand Théâtre de Genève, the Teatr Wielki Warsaw, the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, and at the Salzburg Festival, where he was last heard as Rodolfo, Vaudemont, Faust, and Werther, among others. In 2015, he made his debut as Lohengrin at the Semperoper Dresden alongside Anna Netrebko, under the musical direction of Christian Thielemann.
In addition to his opera career, Piotr Beczała is a sought-after concert and lieder singer. In 2011 and 2012, he participated in the New Year’s Eve concerts at the Semperoper Dresden under the direction of Christian Thielemann. Further concert appearances took him to Baden-Baden, Amsterdam, Madrid, Budapest, Vienna, Milan, and Oman, among other places.
Piotr Beczała was born in Czechowice-Dziedzice in southern Poland and studied at the Music Academy in Katowice, where he was taught by famous singers such as Pavel Lisitsian and Sena Jurinac.
Piotr Beczala is represented on dozens of CDs and DVDs with a wide-ranging repertoire and released three solo albums with Orfeo. Since 2012, he has been an exclusive artist of Deutsche Grammophon, which released his first album “Mein ganzes Herz” in 2013, followed by the second album “The French Collection” in 2015. In 2014, he received the ECHO Klassik as “Singer of the Year”.