About this Artist

Baritone ANDREI SPEKHOV (Mityukhin; Boyar) has been a prizewinner at the Warsaw International Competition (1992, Grand Prize), the All-Russian Competition in Perm (1993, 3rd prize), and the Tokyo International Competition (1993, Mignon 3rd prize). A graduate from the Urals State Mussorgsky Conservatory (class of Professor Golyshev), he was invited to join the Yekaterinburg Theater of Opera and Ballet while he was still a third-year student. At the Yekaterinburg Theater, he performed the most famous roles in the baritone repertoire, among them Escamillo (Bizet's Carmen), Valentine (Gounod's Faust), Don Carlos and Ferdinand (Prokofiev's Betrothal in a Monastery), Alfio (Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana), and Tonio (Leoncavallo's I pagliacci).

In 1993, Spekhov became a soloist with the New Opera. His performances of roles from the Russian and Western European opera repertoires earned him great renown throughout Moscow. Among these roles were Talbot in Donizetti's Maria Stuarda, Don Carlos in Verdi's La forza del destino, Ruslan in Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila, Francesco Foscari in Verdi's Due Foscari, the title role in Rubinstein's The Demon, Gellner in Catalani's La Wally, and Eugene Onegin in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. He has toured with the Mariinsky Theater to Germany, France, the USA, and Yugoslavia, and has also been a member of the Bolshoi Theater since 1996. Spekhov's repertoire, on the stage of the Mariinsky Theater, includes the Messenger (The Tale of Tsar Saltan), the High Priest of Dagon (Samson et Dalila), Count Monterone (Rigoletto), A Sacristan (Tosca), Michele (Il tabarro), Amfortas (Parsifal), Kurwenal (Tristan und Isolde), and the Village Mayor (Jenu°fa).

08/07