The bass-baritone Matthias Winckhler comes from Munich and studied at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg with Andreas Macco and in song and oratorio classes with Wolfgang Holzmair. He has also participated in masterclasses with Matthias Goerne, Markus Hinterhäuser, Graham Johnson, Christa Ludwig, Malcolm Martineau, Bejun Mehta, Michele Pertusi, Rudolf Piernay, Peter Schreier, Bo Skovhus and Breda Zakotnik. He is a prize-winner of several international competitions, including the Mozart Competition in Salzburg (2014) and the Leipzig Bach Competition (2012).
Highlights of the 2025/26 season have included performances of Mendelssohn’s Elijah at the Festival Bach Montréal, Guglielmo (Così fan tutte) at the Leipzig Opera, Bach’s St John Passion at the Zurich Opera House and the title role in semi-staged performances of Handel and Telemann’s opera Otto at the Magdeburg Telemann Festival. He has also appeared in concerts with the Capella Nacional de Catalunya, the Gaechinger Cantorey, the Dresden Philharmonic, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Netherlands Bach Society and the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, and as Leone (Tamerlano) at the Handel Festival in Karlsruhe.
From 2015 to 2018 Matthias Winckhler was an ensemble member of the Hanover State Opera, where his appearances included Count Almaviva (Le nozze di Figaro), Papageno (Die Zauberflöte), Albert (Werther), Belcore (L’elisir d’amore) and Tom in Henze’s The English Cat. Guest engagements have taken him to the Opéra national du Capitole in Toulouse, the Theater an der Wien and the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris.
As a concert singer he appears regularly at major festivals such as the Salzburg Festival, the Salzburg Mozartwoche, the Bachfest Leipzig, the Rheingau Music Festival, the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, the Thüringer Bachwochen and the Kissinger Sommer.
Other ensembles and orchestras with which he has collaborated include the Capella Reial de Catalunya, the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, the NDR Radio Philharmonic, the MDR Symphony Orchestra, the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, the RIAS Chamber Choir, the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, Utopia and the Vienna Philharmonic. He has sung under conductors including Jordi Savall, Peter Dijkstra, Hans-Christoph Rademann, Masaaki Suzuki, Andrew Manze, Jonathan Nott, Teodor Currentzis and Pablo Heras-Casado.
Matthias Winckhler is a keen Lieder singer and works regularly with the pianists Marcelo Amaral, Bernadette Bartos, Verena Metzger, Akemi Murakami and Jan Philip Schulze.
