Performance Year: 2016
The brilliant lyric tenor Alek Shrader continues to impress audiences with the “luxury of his phrasing, the clarity of his diction and the sensitivity and expressiveness of his characterizations.” In the 2014–15 season, he has returned to the San Francisco Opera to sing the role of Emilio in Handel’s Partenope¸ followed by a return to the Metropolitan Opera for Camille in a new production of Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow. Other engagements include Jupiter and Apollo in Handel’s Semele with the Seattle Opera; singing one of his signature roles, Count Almaviva , in Rossini’s Barber of Seville at the Canadian Opera Company, and a return to Santa Fe Opera for Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment. In concert, he has been engaged to sing the title role in Candide with the Vancouver Symphony. Future engagements include leading roles with San Francisco Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Theater an der Wien, and Welsh National Opera.
He has been acclaimed by the San Francisco press as a recitalist who is “natural and effortless, so different from just about everybody else.” A former Adler Fellow with the San Francisco Opera, he made a spectacular mainstage debut in the San Francisco 2008–09 season, replacing an indisposed Ramon Vargas as Nemorino in two performances of L’Elisir d’Amore. Alek Shrader made his professional debut as Almaviva in Rossini’s Barber of Seville at the Opera Theater of St. Louis, where he had spent the previous two summers as a young artist. His roles in previous seasons have ranged from the title role in Rossini’s Le Comte Ory to Tony in Bernstein’s West Side Story.
