ABOUT
“Opera baritone Peter Coleman-Wright is exceptional as the patrician Sir Danvers, conveying just the right level of gravitas, authority and concern for his daughter – musical theatre should snap him up.”
Peter Coleman-Wright has performed in many of the world’s great opera houses including The Metropolitan Opera, New York as Falke (Strauss Die Fledermaus), Belcore (Donizetti L'elisir d'amore), Fieramosca (Berlioz Benvenuto Cellini), and Marcello (Puccini La bohème) and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden as Dandini (Rossini La Cenerentola), Papageno (Mozart Zie Zauberflöte), Billy Budd (Britten, title role), Marcello, Ballad Singer (Britten Paul Bunyan), Don Alvaro (Rossini iIl Viaggio a Reims), Ping (Puccini Turandot), Gunther (Wagner Götterdämmerung), Donner (Wagner Das Rheingold) and Beckmesser Wagner Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg). For English National Opera he has sung Eugene Onegin (Tchaikovsky, title role), Don Giovanni (Mozart, title role), Scarpia (Puccini Tosca), Figaro (Rossini The Barber of Seville), The Traveller (Britten Death in Venice), Billy Budd, The Forrester (Janáček Cunning Little Vixen), Michele (Puccini Il Tabarro), The Prisoner (Dallapiccola, title role), Prince Friedrich Arthur (Henze The Prince of Homburg) and Caligula (Glanert, title role). He created the roles of John in Jonathan Harvey’s Inquest of Love, and Colin in David Blake’s The Plumbers Gift. For the Glyndebourne Festival he has sung Guglielmo (Mozart Cosi fan tutte), Demetrius (Britten A Midsummers Night’s Dream), Sid (Britten Albert Herring) and Pizzaro (Beethoven Fidelio).
He sang Sharpless (Puccini Madama Butterfly) for the Opéra de Paris, Guglielmo and Count Almaviva (Mozart Le nozze di Figaro) Opéra National de Bordeaux, Don Giovanni and Count Almaviva at the Bayerische Staatsoper, and Balstrode (Britten Peter Grimes) and Marcello for Grand Théâtre de Geneve. For the Netherlands Opera he has sung Busoni’s Dr. Faust (title role), Schaunard (La Bohème), and Chorebe (Berlioz Les Troyens) and for La Fenice, Count Almaviva. He made his debut at Teatro alla Scala, Milan in Death in Venice and has appeared at the Aix-en-Provence and Bregenz Festivals. His North American appearances include Houston Grand Opera (Rodrigo in Verdi Don Carlos, Sharpless, and Henry in Jake Heggie’s The End of the Affair), Santa Fe Opera (Sharpless), New York City Opera (Don Giovanni) and Vancouver Opera (Don Giovanni and Count Almaviva).
In his native Australia he has sung Scarpia, Verdi’s Macbeth, Mandryka (Strauss Arabella), Don Giovanni, Count Almaviva, Germont (Verdi La traviata), Billy Budd, Balstrode, Pizzaro, Onegin, Golaud (Debussy Pelléas et Mélisande), and Sweeney Todd (Sondheim, title role - winning the Helpmann Award for Best Actor in a Musical). He created the role of Harry Joy in Brett Dean’s Bliss, which was also performed at the Edinburgh International Festival.
As a concert artist he has performed in the world’s major venues, most notably London’s South Bank and Barbican Centre, Avery Fisher Hall, Wigmore Hall, Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Sydney Opera House and Melbourne Concert Hall. He has recorded extensively for Telarc, Chandos, Hyperion, and EMI.
His engagements include Caligula at the Teatro Colon and in concert at the Concertgebouw Amsterdam with the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest, Death in Venice in Moscow under Rozhdestvensky and Brett Dean’s Last Days of Socrates with both the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under Simone Young and Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra under Gustavo Dudamel. Most recently, he sang Ades Powder her Face for the Warsaw Opera and at La Monnaie in Brussels, Iain Bell's In Parenthesis for Welsh National Opera, Papageno for English National Opera, Kissinger in John Adams’ Nixon in China with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, Guglielmo (Cosi fan tutte) for Opera Holland Park and David in a new opera by Kris Defoort, The Time of our Singing, for Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie.
He was recently awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Melbourne, and was awarded the Order of Australia in the 2015 Queen’s Birthday Honours.
“Peter Coleman-Wright gives a marvellously creepy interpretation of Gunther as an insecure, spineless, nouveau-riche dandy."
“Australian baritone Peter Coleman-Wright wowed audiences at the English National Opera with his twisted tour-de-force portrayal...”
"Peter Coleman-Wright...oiled the wheels of the plot with cynical asperity"