Thomas Guthrie - Baritone

The singer and stage director Thomas Guthrie began his musical training as a boy under George Guest at St John's College Cambridge. He then returned to Cambridge to read Classics at Trinity before winning a scholarship to study at the RNCM, where prizes include the Fassbaender Award for Lieder, the Schubert Prize, and an ESU scholarship to study with Thomas Allen in Chicago.  He has sung in some of the world's most prestigious venues from Bolivia and New York to Tokyo and Sydney and is a regular at the Wigmore Hall and the South Bank.  Recent productions of Magic Flute (winner of an Angel Award at the 2007 Brighton Festival), Fairy Queen (Evening Standard Cultural Highlight of 2006) and Winterreise ('must-see', Independent) have put him in the front rank of young stage directors.

Roles include Don Giovanni and Count (Marriage of Figaro), Papageno (Magic Flute), Ferryman (Curlew River), Denisov (War and Peace), Mr Jenks (The Tender Land), and Sir Hugh Evans (Sir John in Love), Cold Genius (King Arthur), Drunken Poet (Fairy Queen), Aeneas (Dido and Aeneas). In 2006 he created the role of the Officer, based on the writer Henry Williamson, in Stephen McNeff's opera Tarka the Otter.  He has sung Hel Helson (Paul Bunyan) and Sir Henry Cuffe (Gloriana) for Richard Hickox at the St Endellion Festival and has been a member of Glyndebourne Festival Chorus. Recently he performed in Streetwise Opera's Britten Canticles at Westminster Abbey and their staging of Mahler's Rückert Lieder in Nottingham.  With Streetwise Opera he has taken part in regular music theatre workshops with London's homeless.

Recordings include War and Peace for Chandos, Rameau, Biber and Charpentier for ASV, Purcell for Deux Elles and Bach Cantatas for John Eliot Gardiner. His recording of Biber with Sonnerie was awarded a Gramophone Award in 2002.

As a director, productions include Mozart's Magic Flute, Der Stein der Weisen, Impresario, Purcell's Fairy Queen and King Arthur, Cimarosa's Two Barons of Rocca Azzurra, Donizetti's Rita, the David Owen Norris and Mozart triple bill Two Murders and a Marriage, and Bach's St John Passion. His production of Winterreise with puppet and animation visited festivals last year in St Endellion, Buxton, Oslo and Aldeburgh.  Plans include the world premiere of Bootmaker's Daughter at Brighton Festival with the Cardinall's Musick and Walton's The Bear at the ROH Linbury Studio Theatre.  In August 2007 he took up a two year position as Young Artist Stage Director at the Royal Opera House.