Toni Nežić

October 2023 at the Sofia National Opera drew Toni Nežić to the same stage as Sarah Mehnert, Miyoung Lee, Erica Cortese and Donghyun Kim. He took his master's degree in voice at the Academy of Music in Zagreb, where his student roles included Claudio in Handel's Agrippina, and won first prizes at the Lazar Jovanovic competition in Belgrade and at the national competition for music students in Dubrovnik. His professional debut came in 2016 as soloist in Haydn's Nelson Mass in Zagreb with the orchestra of Croatian Radiotelevision, after which he sang with the Zagreb Philharmonic and the Dubrovnik Symphony under Mladen Tarbuk and Niksa Bareza. He sang Sparafucile and Mujich at the Wexford Festival in 2017 and returned in 2018 for Mercadante's Il bravo and Don Pasquale. From 2019 he held a fellowship at La Scala, with ten performances of Sparafucile in Rigoletto under Daniel Oren and more than twenty as Alidoro in La Cenerentola per i bambini; in 2021 he completed the Accademia Teatro alla Scala under Luciana D'Intino and covered Banco in the Macbeth that opened the 2021/22 season.