American tenor Peter Tantsits has made a name for himself above all in 20th- and 21st-century music by Britten, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Janáček, Richard Strauss, Mahler, Milton Babbitt, Luigi Nono, György Ligeti, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pascal Dusapin and Bernd Alois Zimmermann.
In 2022 he made his Dresden State Opera debut as Mr Smith in Luciano Chailly’s Die kahle Sängerin and also sang Andres (Wozzeck) at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. He has appeared in Basel in Shostakovich’s The Nose and will be returning there as Herod (Salome) and as Un Emigrante (Intolleranza 1960).
Recent engagements include Gerald Barry’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and for Irish National Opera, the world premiere of Dai Fujikura’s A Dream of Armageddon at Tokyo’s New National Theatre and Gandhi in Philip Glass’s Satyagraha and Max Aue in the world premiere of Hèctor Parra’s Les Bienveillantes at the Vlaamse Opera in Antwerp. He has also appeared in Thierry Escaich’s opera Point d’orgue at the Opéra de Saint-Étienne and in Zhou Long’s Madame White Snake at the 2019 Hong Kong Arts Festival.
Other engagements have taken Peter Tantsits to the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Berlin Philharmonie, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Baden-Baden Festspielhaus, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Cologne Opera, the Glyndebourne Festival, the Festival d’Automne in Paris, the Los Angeles Opera and the opera houses in Mainz, Bonn, St Gallen and Karlsruhe. Among the roles in his repertoire are Alviano (Die Gezeichneten), Ferraud in Hermann Wolfgang von Waltershausen’s Oberst Chabert, the title role in Dusapin’s Perelà, uomo di fumo, the White Minister in Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre and the tenor soloist in Nono’s Canti di vita e d’amore.
He has appeared in Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten at the Bavarian State Opera and in Lorin Maazel’s 1984 at La Scala, Milan. In 2019 he sang Erik (Der fliegende Holländer) under Fabio Luisi at the Maggio Musicale in Florence.
