Two of Europe's hottest barihunks will be singing Don Giovanni and Masetto at Beijing's National Centre for the Performing Arts. Italian Vittorio Prato will take on Mozart's title character alongside Austrian Thomas Tatzl's Masetto.
The theatre is rotating a European cast on November 27, 29 and December 1 with an all-Chinese cast on November 28 and 30. Tickets and additional cast information is available online. The Chinese cast includes the amazing bass-baritone Ao Li as Leporello, who won the 2014 Operalia competition and has become a fixture at the San Francisco Opera.
Ao Li performs at the Mt Fuji Vocal Competition:
The National Centre for the Performing Arts was founded in 2010 and features European and Chinese artists performing both Western and Chinese opera. Chinese operas have included Guo Wenjing's Rickshaw Boy, Qing Yin's The Long March, Meng Weidong'sFANG Zhimin, Lei Lei's The Jinsha River andVisitors from the Snow Mountain.
We briefly featured Chinese barihunk Yunpeng Wang in a post about the Operalia Competition in 2002, but have never properly introduced him to readers. Opera goers in New York may already know him, as a member of the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program who has already been cast at the Metropolitan Opera as Fiorello in Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia and the Flemish Duputy in Verdi’s Don Carlo.
He is currently headed back to his native country to make his role debut as Count Almaviva in Mozart’s Le Nozze di
Figaro at the spectacular National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing. Performances are running from May 14-17 and tickets and additional cast information are available online.
Earlier this year, he sang Agamemnon in the Lindemann/Juilliard co-production of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide. This summer he returns to the Rossini Opera Festival as Filippo in a new production of La Gazzetta in Pesaro, Italy.
Yunpeng Wang sings Di Provenza from La traviata:
Wang has been the recipient of several awards, including three prizes at Plácido Domingo’s Operalia Competition: the 2nd Place Prize, the Zarzuela Prize, and the Audience Award. He has won First Prize in the 2014 Gerda Lissner Foundation International Vocal Competition, and First Prize in the Alan M. and Joan Taub Ades Vocal Competition. As a winner of Operalia, he appeared in the Voices of 2012 concert with the Budapest Symphony Orchestra MÁV in Pécs, Hungary.
Other recent engagements include Beethoven’s Symphony No.9 and Xian Xinghai’s The Yellow River Cantata with the Hartford Symphony, and participated in the “Zürich Stiftung Opera Bel Canto Night” under the tutelage of Francisco Araiza in Switzerland.
Wang received a Bachelor’s Degree in Music from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, and a Master’s Degree in Vocal Performance from The Manhattan School of Music, where he was invited to attend on full scholarship.
