biography

Alastair Miles is internationally recognised as one of the world's leading basses.

Born in Harrow, he studied flute at London's Guildhall School of Music and became an orchestral player and teacher before embarking on his highly successful vocal career. He won the 1986 Decca Kathleen Ferrier Award and was soon in demand by opera companies, orchestras and recording companies alike.

He has a stylistically wide repertoire, equally at home with Baroque music as he is with the full-blooded romanticism of Verdi, and with the flexibility of voice to encompass both.

He has sung at the Metropolitan Opera (Sparafucile in Rigoletto, Giorgio in I Puritani and Raimondo in Lucia di Lammermoor); Paris – Bastille (Raimondo); Vienna (Prefetto in Linda di Chamonix, Giorgio in Puritani, Cardinal Brogni in La Juive, Silva in Ernani, Zaccaria in Nabucco, Walter in Luisa Miller, Philippe II in Don Carlos and Padre Guardiano in La Forza del Destino); Bayerische Staatsoper (Giorgio, Raimondo, title role in Handel’s Saul, Zoroastro in Orlando); San Francisco (Giorgio, Raimondo and Basilio in Il Barbiere di Siviglia); Amsterdam (Figaro in Le Nozze di Figaro, Raimondo), Madrid (Philip II in Don Carlo, Raimondo and Muley-Hassem in Emilio Arrieta’s La Conquista di Granata); Seville (Mephistopheles in Gounod’s Faust); Palermo (Walter in Luisa Miller); Pesaro (Le Gouverneur in Rossini’s Le Compte Ory).

He regularly appears with all the UK opera companies. Roles for WNO include Colline (La Boheme), Silva, Zaccaria, Mephistopheles (Gounod and Berlioz), Fiesco (Simon Boccanegra). For Glyndebourne: Speaker (Die Zauberflöte), Fiesco. For Opera North: Philip II, Zaccaria. For ENO: Colline, Harasta (The Cunning Little Vixen), Zaccaria, Silva, title role in Boito’s Mefistofeles and Ford in Vaughan Williams’ Sir John in Love; For the Royal Opera: Colline, Lord Sidney (Rossini’s Il Viaggio a Rheims), Sparafucile, Rodolfo (La Sonnambula), Elmiro (Rossini’s Otello), Banquo (Macbeth), Brogni (La Juive) and Dom Juam de Sylva in Donizetti’s Dom Sebastien.

Alastair is a highly sought after concert artist and has appeared with the world’s most prestigious conductors and orchestras including Giulini, Harnoncourt, Muti, Chung, Rattle, Runnicles, Masur, Gergiev, Gardiner, Norrington, Davis and Dohnanyi. Recent projects have included performances of La Damnation de Faust, The Dream of Gerontius and Handel’s Messiah with Davis and the LSO, Schumann’s Faustszenen with Harnoncourt and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra under Tilson-Thomas.

His impressive discography currently stands at over seventy recordings including a solo Great Operatic Arias disc for Chandos. He enjoys a special relationship with Opera Rara and shares their aim of bringing the delights of neglected nineteenth century Italian and French Opera to a wider public. His latest release on that label is Ambroise Thomas’ La Cour de Célimène, a delightful opera comique which is sure to continue the trend.

Future engagements include his debut as Nick Shadow in The Rake’s Progress (Vienna, Theater an der Wien) and performances of Handel’s Alcina and Il Viaggio a Rheims at La Scala, Milan.

Alastair features on Volume 4 of Hyperion's Complete Songs of Richard Strauss , due for release in February 2009.