Steve Davislim

Steve Davislim was born in Penang in 1967 and grew up in Australia, where he played the horn and took a music degree at the Victorian College of the Arts before Dame Joan Hammond took his voice in hand; two years with the accompanist Irwin Gage in Zurich completed the training. He joined the Zurich Opera ensemble in 1994 and stayed close to Mozart — Tamino, Don Ottavio, Almaviva, and the title role of Idomeneo at La Scala in 2005 — while bringing the same clarity of line to Bach and Handel. Salzburg, the Berlin Staatsoper, Hamburg and Lyric Opera of Chicago engaged him regularly, and he recorded the Ninth Symphony with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich and Bach cantatas with John Eliot Gardiner. He died in 2024.