The Swedish baritone Peter Mattei studied at the Royal Academy of Music and at the University College of Opera in Stockholm. He made his début in 1990 as Nardo in Mozart’s La Finta Giardiniera at the Drottningholm Court Theatre and made a sensational Royal Swedish Opera début as Pentheus in Daniel Börtz’ The Bacchae in 1991. He has now established himself as one of the most sought-after singers of his generation and has worked with conductors such as Sir Georg Solti, Claudio Abbado, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Sir John Eliot Gardiner and Gustavo Dudamel.
Among the many eminent opera houses at which he has appeared are the Metropolitan Opera in New York, La Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London, and the Berlin, Vienna and Bavarian State Operas, singing music by such composers as Mozart (the Count in Le nozze di Figaro and the title role in Don Giovanni), Verdi (Posa in Don Carlo), Wagner (Amfortas in Parsifal and Wolfram in Tannhäuser) and Britten (the title role in Billy Budd). He has worked with leading directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Sir Peter Brook, Patrice Chéreau and Michael Haneke. He has also sung at prestigious festivals in Aix-en-Provence, Glyndebourne, Salzburg and Lucerne.
Mattei’s concert repertoire includes Mendelssohn’s Elijah, Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem, Sibelius’s Kullervo, Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn, Bach’s Passions, Handel’s Messiah, Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony and Britten’s War Requiem. Among his numerous BIS recordings are discs of great baritone arias (BIS-1749) and of songs by Wilhelm Stenhammar (BIS-654).
