Biography
Guest of the National Theare Opera.
Charles Workman was born in Arkansas and is a graduate of the Juilliard School. A highly-regarded interpreter of Mozart, Rossini and French opera, he is a versatile artist whose repertory ranges from Monteverdi and Baroque music to 20th Century and contemporary opera. Following early debuts at the Metropolitan Opera and other American opera houses, he moved to London in 1995 and has performed with Europe’s leading opera companies and orchestras, including Paris National Opera, Royal Opera Covent Garden, Milan La Scala, Opernhaus Zurich, Berlin Staatsoper unter den Linden, English National Opera, Rossini Opera Festival, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Frankfurt Opera, Venice La Fenice, Barcelona Liceu, Madrid Teatro Real, Brussels Monnaie, Geneva Grand Théâtre, Prague National Theater, and Munich Bavarian State Opera. In 1999 he made a critically acclaimed debut with the Salzburg Festival as Abaris in Rameau’s Les Boréades under Sir Simon Rattle, and also debuted with the Berlin Philharmonic under Claudio Abbado, in Berlin and at the Salzburg Easter Festival, with Bach’s B Minor Mass.
Recent highlights include performances as Idomeneo (Paris Opera), Silvio in Martin y Soler's L'Arbore di Diana (Barcelona Liceu), Don Ottavio (Santa Fe Opera), Jupiter opposite Cecilia Bartoli's Semele (Opernhaus Zurich), Acis in Acis and Galatea (Royal Opera Covent Garden), Polo in Tan Dun's Marco Polo (Netherlands Opera), and Flamand in Capriccio, Albert Gregor in The Makropulos Case, and the Prince in L’Amour des trois oranges (all for Paris Opera).
His recordings include Gluck’s Armide, Mozart’s Il sogno di Scipione, Bizet’s La jolie fille de Perth, and Rossini’s Moise et Pharaon, as well as DVDs of Semele (Opernhaus Zurich), L'Amour des trois Oranges and Cardillac (Paris Opera), Marco Polo (Netherlands Opera), Arabella (Metropolitan Opera), and Rossini’s La Gazzetta (Barcelona Liceu) and Tancredi (Trieste Teatro Verdi).
Future engagements include the title roles in Idomeneo (National Theater of Prague), Pfitzner's Palastrina (Munich Bavarian State Opera) and Zemlinsky's Der Zwerg (Paris Opera), plus Jupiter in Semele (Vienna Theater an der Wien), Albert Gregor in The Makropulos Case (Strasbourg Opéra National du Rhin), Tempo in Handel's Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (Staatsoper Stuttgart), and the Prince in L'Amour des trois Oranges (Paris Opera).
Update: January 2010