tenor
Performance Dates
March 29/31 8:00 PM
BACH: St John Passion
Thomas Cooley has been praised for his clear, supple, lyrical, powerful and expressive voice. This, combined with his musicianship and sense of style makes him equally at home on the opera, concert and recital stages. These concerts mark his debut with the ASO.
As a concert performer, Mr. Cooley appears regularly with major orchestras and ensembles such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, Gewandhaus Orchestra Leipzig, Bavarian Radio Orchestra, Bach Collegium Stuttgart, Cologne Philharmonie, and Berliner Singakademie, as well as with such leading Baroque orchestras as the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Tafelmusik, and Akadamie für Alte Musik Berlin. His concert repertoire encompasses a wide range of works, but centers around the great works of Monteverdi, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Britten, in which the Evangelist in Bach’s Passions and the great oratorios of Handel, such as Jephtha, Samson, and Judas Maccabeus, figure most prominently. He a favorite of conductors Helmuth Rilling, Peter Schreier, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Nicholas McGegan, and Bruno Weil. Recent engagements include the Swiss premiere of Wolfgang Rihm’s new Lukas Passion setting, Deus Passus with Helmuth Rilling, and Ramirez’s Misa criolla with the Munich MottetenChor in New York’s Avery Fisher Hall.
Mr. Cooley has been engaged since 2002 at the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz in Munich, where he has been singing such roles as Count Almaviva in Rossini’s Barber of Seville,Ferrando in Così fan tutte, Tamino in The magic Flute, Belmonte in The Abduction from the Seraglio, the title role in Idomeneo, and Felix Nightingale in the Baroque pasticcio Ein Theater nach der Mode. Other operatic roles include Oronte in Handel’s Alcina, Ugone in Handel’s Flavio, Nerone in Monteverdi’s Coronation of Poppea, Jaquino in Beethoven’s Fidelio, and Leandro in Busoni’s Arlecchino.
The art of the song recital is particularly important to this young tenor. A recording of German Christmas songs with the guitarist Carsten Linck was released on CD in 2000. He performed a recital of Britten’s Winter Words and Still Falls the Rain at the Britten Festival in Aldeburgh with pianist Andrew West, with whom he will also perform Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge at the International Chamber Music Festival in Nuremberg. He also performs regularly with the pianist Donald Sulzen, with whom he will record the Holy Sonnets of John Donne by Britten for the Bavarian Radio.
Mr. Cooley was born in Minneapolis, has lived in Germany for last nine years, and recently moved to New Haven, Connecticut. He loves to cook and collect antiques.
website: www.thomascooley.com
Last Updated: August 31, 2006
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Thomas Cooley 
