Paata Burchuladze

Paata Burchuladze was born in Tbilisi and trained there with Olimpi Khelashvili before joining the Georgian opera company. Selected with other young Soviet singers for advanced study at La Scala, he worked in Milan with Giulietta Simionato and Edoardo Müller, and a run of competition victories followed: the Voci Verdiane in Busseto in 1981, the gold medal at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1982 and the Pavarotti Competition in 1985. His breakthrough came at Covent Garden as Ramfis in Aida, beside Katia Ricciarelli and Luciano Pavarotti under Zubin Mehta, and from there his dark, capacious bass opened every major stage: Boris Godunov, Nabucco, Macbeth, Luisa Miller and Simon Boccanegra at La Scala, the Vienna and Bavarian state operas, Hamburg, Paris, San Francisco, Washington and the Metropolitan Opera. Boris Godunov and the Verdi bass roles became his calling cards. A concert with him and the Sofia Philharmonic under Nayden Todorov, planned as the season opening on 21 September 2018, did not take place. Herbert von Karajan brought him to Salzburg in 1987 for the Commendatore in Don Giovanni, and he opened the Metropolitan Opera's 1990/91 season as Boris Godunov, reaching his hundredth performance of the role in Munich in July 1995. He sang regularly with the New Israeli Opera from 1994 and recorded for Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, EMI and Philips. The Stuttgart State Opera made him a Kammersänger in 1998, he was appointed a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador in 2006 and a UNICEF ambassador in 2010, and Austria gave him its Cross of Honour for Science and Art, First Class, in 2014.