Clive Bayley

The bass Clive Bayley was born in Manchester and appears regularly at leading opera houses. Recent engagements have included the Prison Governor (From the House of the Dead) at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome, Somnus / Cadmus (Semele) at Glyndebourne Festival, Don Basilio (Il barbiere di Siviglia) at the Norwegian Opera in Oslo, Swallow (Peter Grimes) at the English National Opera, Swallow, the Ghost of the late king (Hamlet) and Doctor Carlos Conde in a new production of Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel at the Paris Opéra and Dikoj (Káťa Kabanová) at Grange Park Opera.

Other past engagements have included Tirésias in Enescu’s Œdipe in Paris; the title role of Battistelli’s Julius Caesar in Rome; Doctor (Wozzeck) at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich; Swallow at the Teatro Real in Madrid and at the Frankfurt Opera; Tsar Ivan in Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Maid of Pskov, Capulet (Roméo et Juliette) and Sacristan (The Adventures of Mr Brouček) for Grange Park Opera; Dikoj at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam; Judge / Commissioner in Philip Glass’s Orphée and Priest / Badger (The Cunning Little Vixen) at the English National Opera; Claggart (Billy Budd) at the Göteborg Opera and for the Frankfurt Opera; Fafner (Siegfried) with the Hallé Orchestra; Daland (Der fliegende Holländer) at the Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen; Publio (La clemenza di Tito) at Glyndebourne and First Nazarene (Salome) at the Edinburgh International Festival.

In 2014 he made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York as Doctor; this was followed by various other important engagements, including Astradamors (Le Grand Macabre) at the San Francisco Opera, Sir Walter Raleigh in Britten’s Gloriana at the Hamburg State Opera and at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Geronte de Ravoir (Manon Lescaut) and Achilla (Giulio Cesare) in Munich, Fasolt (Das Rheingold) at the Opéra national du Rhin and Prince Gremin (Eugene Onegin) and the title role of Massenet’s Don Quichotte at Grange Park Opera.

He made his debut at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, as Second Prisoner (Fidelio), returning as Agravain in the world premiere of Harrison Birtwistle’s Gawain, Biterolf (Tannhäuser), Colline (La bohème), Hans Foltz (Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg), Carbon in Alfano’s Cyrano de Bergerac, Thoas (Iphigénie en Tauride), Silvano (La Calisto), Hunding (Die Walküre) and Sir Walter Raleigh.

His wide-ranging discography includes several complete opera recordings in the series Opera in English for the Chandos label, Fafner and Hunding in the recording of Wagner’s Ring with the Hallé Orchestra under Mark Elder, Leonard Bernstein’s recording of Candide, and several recordings with Les Arts Florissants under William Christie.