The Russian bass Aleksei Kulagin studied with Nikolai Okhotnikov and Edem Umerov at the St Petersburg Conservatory. From 2019 he was a participant in the Young Artist Opera Programme at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, under the direction of Dmitry Vdovin. As a member of the Young Singers Project, he made his Salzburg Festival debut in 2022 as Simone (Gianni Schicchi) in a new production of Il trittico. He has participated in masterclasses with Makvala Kasrashvili, Neil Shicoff, Evamaria Wieser, Robert Körner, Sergei Leiferkus, Ernesto Palacio, Plácido Domingo, Ildar Abdrazakov and Rosetta Cucchi and has appeared in concerts with Liuba Orfenova, Semyon Skigin, Ivari Ilja and Mzia Bakhtouridze in the Beethoven Hall of the Bolshoi Theatre. He has performed on both the main and new stages of the Bolshoi Theatre, and at the Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, the Hungarian State Opera in Budapest, the Georgian National Opera and Ballet Theatre in Tbilisi, the Zaryadye Concert Hall and the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in Moscow, the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory and the St Petersburg Philharmonia.
His recent opera engagements have included Timur (Turandot) and Hermit (Der Freischütz) at the Semperoper Dresden, Sparafucile (Rigoletto) at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo and Colline (La bohème) at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the Teatro Regio in Parma and the Semperoper Dresden. His repertory also includes King René and Bertrand (Iolanta), Sobakin (The Tsar’s Bride), Prince Gremin (Eugene Onegin), Father Frost and Bermyata (The Snowmaiden), Aleko and the Old Man (Aleko), Masetto (Don Giovanni) and Angelotti (Tosca). On the concert platform he has appeared in repertory including Mozart’s Requiem and Schubert’s Mass No. 2.
Conductors with whom Aleksei Kulagin has collaborated include Tugan Sokhiev, Franz Welser-Möst, Alexander Solovyov, Dmitry Korchak, Mikhail Sinkevich, Philipp Chizhevsky, Anton Grishanin, Mikhail Tatarnikov, Pavel Bubelnikov and Konstantin Chudovsky.
He has won prizes in numerous international competitions, including second prize at the 2022 Éva Marton Singing Competition in Budapest, fourth prize at the 2022 ‘Tenor Viñas’ Singing Competition in Barcelona, first prize at the 2021 ‘Opera Crown’ Competition in Tbilisi, first prize at the 2021 Galina Vishnevskaya Opera Singers Competition in Moscow, second prize at the 2021 Elena Obraztsova Competition of Young Opera Singers in St Petersburg and first prize in the 2021 José Carreras Grand Prix in Moscow.
