Теодор Илинкай

Covent Garden heard Teodor Ilincăi as Rodolfo in December 2009, eleven months after his first appearance outside Romania. Born in 1983, he graduated from the National University of Music in Bucharest in 2006 — his subject was pedagogy and Byzantine music — and joined the Bucharest National Opera in the same year. First prize at the tenors' competition in Szczecin in 2008 was followed by Macduff at the Hamburg State Opera in January 2009, Ismaele at the Vienna State Opera that March, and second prize at the Francisco Viñas competition in Barcelona in 2010. The spinto repertory has been his territory since: Cavaradossi, Turiddu, Canio, Manrico, Calaf, Radamès, Pinkerton, Don José and the title role in Otello, in houses from the Semperoper and the Staatsoper Berlin to the Liceu, where he returned to Rodolfo in 2012. Romania made him a Knight of the Order of the Crown in 2016 and an Officer of it two years later. In Bucharest his casts have included Simona Neagu, Sidonia Nica, Petar Naydenov and Dorina Chesei; in Prague in 2025 he shared a stage with Angela Gheorghiu. Pollione in Norma, sung in Bucharest in January 2015, opened the lirico-spinto path, and the title role in Don Carlos followed in 2017 at the Opéra de Marseille and the Deutsche Oper Berlin, with Maurizio in Adriana Lecouvreur taken up in Seville. The Romanian Music Forum gave him its Ludovic Spiess Prize in 2009, and he has published two volumes of poetry and aphorisms, Cromatisme in 2013 and Mozaic in 2019.