The baritone Lauri Vasar studied at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre in Tallinn and at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg.
In 2003 he made his first appearances at the Salzburg Festival as a Flemish Deputy (Don Carlos) and as Pentheus’s Servant in a concert performance of Egon Wellesz’s Die Bakchantinnen.
Past career highlights have included Donner and Gunther (Der Ring des Nibelungen), Figaro (Le nozze di Figaro), Sharpless (Madama Butterfly) and Don Carlos (Betrothal in a Monastery) at the Berlin State Opera; Olivier (Capriccio) at the Paris Opéra, the Opéra national de Lyon and La Monnaie in Brussels; Gunther at the Teatro Real in Madrid; Kovalyov in Shostakovich’s The Nose and King in George Benjamin’s Lessons in Love and Violence at the Zurich Opera House; Wolfram (Tannhäuser), Gunther and Amfortas (Parsifal) at the Wagner Days at Müpa in Budapest; Orest (Elektra) and Papageno (Die Zauberflöte) at the Estonian National Opera in Tallinn; and the title role in Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero at the Greek National Opera in Athens, the Hanover State Opera, the Royal Festival Hall in London, the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam and in Lyon.
In the 2025/26 season he returned to the Berlin State Opera as Gunther and made his debut as Barak (Die Frau ohne Schatten) at Teatr Wielki in Warsaw.
Recent engagements have also included Shchelkalov (Boris Godunov) and Orest at the Hamburg State Opera, Orest and Amfortas at the Berlin State Opera, Papageno at the San Francisco Opera, Sharpless at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, and Duke of Gloucester in Reimann’s Lear at the Teatro Real in Madrid.
He has worked with conductors including Daniel Barenboim, Christian Thielemann, Simone Young, Bertrand de Billy, Sebastian Weigle, Kirill Petrenko, Adam Fischer, Peter Schneider, Gustavo Dudamel and Philippe Jordan and with directors including Robert Carsen, Stefan Herheim, Calixto Bieito, Peter Stein and Christof Loy.
He was nominated for the German theatre award DER FAUST for his interpretation of the title role of Billy Budd at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein.
