John Tomlinson

British bass John Tomlinson was appointed a Commander of the British Empire in 1997 and was knighted in 2005. He was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award for Singers in 1991, 1998 and 2007 and in 2014 he received the Society’s Gold Medal.
John Tomlinson’s engagements have taken him to all the world’s leading opera houses, including those in Milan, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Munich, Vienna, Barcelona and Tokyo as well as the Bayreuth Festival, where he sang for 18 consecutive seasons, the Salzburg Festival, where he made his debut in Messiah in 1988, and the Orange, Aix-en-Provence, Edinburgh and Florence Festivals. He has appeared regularly at the English National Opera since 1974 and has been closely associated with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, since 1977.
His repertoire includes Wagner’s Wotan /Wanderer, Hagen, Titurel, Gurnemanz, King Marke, King Heinrich, Hans Sachs, Landgrave, the Dutchman and Daland as well as Ochs, Sarastro, Leporello, the Commendatore, Rocco, King Philip, the Grand Inquisitor, Fiesco, Borromeo (Palestrina), Orestes (Elektra), Moses (Moses und Aron), Claggart (Billy Budd), the Doctor (Wozzeck), the four villains in Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Golaud and Arkel (Pelléas et Mélisande), Boris, Pimen and Varlaam (Boris Godunov), Dosifey (Khovanshchina), Ivan Susanin (A Life for the Tsar), Boris Timofeyevich Izmaylov (Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District), the General (The Gambler), Thomas Becket (Assassinio nella cattedrale) and the title roles in Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, Oberto, Mosè in Egitto and Birtwistle’s The Minotaur. He sang the Green Knight in Birtwistle’s Gawain not only at its world premiere but also at the 2013 Salzburg Festival. Many of his roles are documented on CD.
During the 2015/16 season John Tomlinson was heard as Ivan Susanin in Frankfurt and as Varlaam and Tirésias (Œdipe) at Covent Garden, where he will take part in a new production of The Nose next season.
John Tomlinson appears in a wide-ranging concert repertoire and has sung with every leading British orchestra as well as in Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Denmark and the USA.

Current as of August 2016