Roberto Alagna

Self-taught to a degree almost unheard of at this level, Alagna learned to sing in the cabarets of Paris, where the Cuban bass Rafael Ruiz became his first real coach and Mario Lanza's films supplied the ambition. Born at Clichy-sous-Bois in 1963 to a Sicilian family, he won the Pavarotti competition in Philadelphia in 1988 and made his debut as Alfredo with Glyndebourne's touring company; he sang that one role well over a hundred times around the smaller French and Italian houses before the great theatres opened to him. La Scala came in 1990, Covent Garden in 1992, the Metropolitan in 1996, and the Roméo he sang in London in 1994 settled the matter. More than sixty roles have followed — Don José, Rodolfo, Cavaradossi, Radamès, Canio, Calaf and eventually Otello — together with a discography built under exclusive contracts to EMI, Deutsche Grammophon and Sony Classical. Recent seasons have brought Fedora in Geneva, Tosca in Vienna, and Carmen and Aida in the arena at Verona. The French chanson has never been a sideline for him but a parallel career, and his Hors-la-loi programme has lately taken him back into rooms the size of the ones he started in. Two operas were written for him, Vladimir Cosma's Marius et Fanny and Le dernier jour d'un condamné by David Alagna, first staged in France in 2014, and he has taken up neglected scores such as Alfano's Cyrano de Bergerac, revived in its 1935 version at the Metropolitan Opera in 2017. He reached a hundredth performance at the Opéra de Paris as Otello and a hundredth at Covent Garden as Andrea Chénier in May 2019, and made his first Wagner appearances as Lohengrin in Berlin in 2020. In 2023 he played Al Capone at the Folies Bergère in a musical written for him by Jean-Félix Lalanne.