John Relyea

John Relyea has appeared on many of the world’s great opera stages, including the Metropolitan Opera, the San Francisco Opera, where he is an alumnus of the Merola Opera Program and a former Adler Fellow, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the Paris Opéra, La Scala, Milan, the Bavarian and Vienna State Operas, the Mariinsky Theatre, the opera houses in Rome, Naples, Dresden, Madrid and Barcelona and the Canadian Opera Company.

His extensive repertoire includes the title roles in Attila, Don Quichotte, Aleko, Le nozze di Figaro and Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, Zaccaria (Nabucco), Bertram (Robert le Diable), Pagano (I Lombardi alla prima crociata), Raimondo (Lucia di Lammermoor), Colline (La bohème), Alfonso (Lucrezia Borgia), Basilio (Il barbiere di Siviglia), Alidoro (La Cenerentola), Giorgio (Il puritani), Enrico VIII (Anna Bolena), Banco (Macbeth), Gounod’s and Berlioz’s Méphistophélès, the Four Villains in Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Marke (Tristan und Isolde), Filippo II (Don Carlo), Caspar (Der Freischütz), Nick Shadow (The Rake’s Progress), Collatinus (The Rape of Lucretia), Vodník (Rusalka) and King René (Iolanta).

As a concert artist he has performed with the Berlin, Vienna and New York Philharmonics, the London, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, Dallas, San Francisco, St. Louis, Sydney and NDR Symphony Orchestras, the Philadelphia and Cleveland Orchestras, the Orchestre de Paris and the Orchestra Sinfonica della RAI. Among the international festivals where he has been invited to appear are Tanglewood, Ravinia, Edinburgh and Lucerne, New York’s Mostly Mozart Festival, the BBC Proms and the Salzburg Festival, where he made his debut in 2001.

John Relyea’s most recent operatic engagements include Bluebeard at the Paris Opéra, Claggart (Billy Budd) in Rome and Oslo, his debut at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples as Fiesco (Simon Boccanegra), Zaccaria in a concert performance of Nabucco with the Dutch Radio Philharmonic in Amsterdam and Marcel (Les Huguenots) at the Dresden Semperoper.

Plans include Gremin (Eugene Onegin) in Rome and Hunding (Die Walküre) at the Paris Opéra and concert performances of Faust with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and of Oedipus Rex at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw.

On CD John Relyea may be heard in Verdi’s Requiem under Colin Davis, in Idomeneo and La clemenza di Tito under Charles Mackerras and in Mahler’s Eighth Symphony under Simon Rattle.