Soloist

Reinhard Mayr

The bass singer Reinhard Mayr, born in Upper Austria, trained as a singer with the bass singer Franz Kalchmair in Linz, at the Basel Academy of Music under Kurt Widmer, and with Robert Holl at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. Immediately after completing his studies, he was engaged by the Vienna Volksoper, made his debut shortly afterwards at the Vienna State Opera, and moved to the Zurich Opera House in 2001, where he remained a member of the company for 16 seasons.

His repertoire ranges from Baroque bass roles, such as Monteverdi’s Plutone or Tiridate in Handel’s »Radamisto«, through Mozart’s Sarastro (»Die Zauberflöte«), Bartolo (»Le nozze di Figaro«) and Masetto (»Don Giovanni«), to numerous roles in the operas of Richard Strauss, as well as in the Italian and Russian repertoires, right through to modern works and world premieres. Over the years, he has worked with conductors such as Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Zubin Mehta, Christoph von Dohnáyi, Franz Welser-Möst, John Eliot Gardiner, Marc Minkowski, William Christie and Thomas Hengelbrock.

As well as opera, the singer devotes himself wholeheartedly to the lied and oratorio. His particular favourites include, above all, Baroque sacred music and the lieder of Franz Schubert. As a concert singer, he has performed at venues such as the Vienna Musikverein, the Royal Albert Hall, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the concert halls in Vienna and Berlin, Severance Hall in Cleveland, and, in January 2025, he gave a recital at Carnegie Hall in New York. Reinhard Mayr has also been performing regularly for many years with various Baroque ensembles, such as Ensemble ColCanto, with whom he recorded a CD of sacred solo cantatas in 2015.

Reinhard Mayr made his debut at the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz in 2022 as Frank, the prison governor, in »Die Fledermaus«.