Luca Pisaroni

Italian bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni has emerged as an important specialist in in operatic roles of Mozart and Handel. In opera and also in concert choral music roles, he has sung with top conductors in both the modern-instrument and historical-performance fields.

Pisaroni was born in Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela, on June 8, 1975. His family was Italian, and they moved back to Italy when he was four; Pisaroni grew up there in Busseto, the hometown of Verdi. He attended the opera often with his father as a child, and by the time he was 11 he had settled on an operatic career. Pisaroni took lessons at a local school run by famed tenor Carlo Bergonzi; although he did not study directly with Bergonzi, he heard him sing and teach, and he counts Bergonzi as an influence. Pisaroni enrolled at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan but then traveled to New York and Buenos Aires for lessons with Renato Sassola and Rosita Zozulya, respectively.

Pisaroni made his debut as Figaro in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro in Klagenfurt, Austria, in 2001 and quickly found other roles; that year he earned the Vienna State Opera's Eberhard Wächter Medal as a leading artist of the new generation. He sang the bass part in Haydn's Mass in D minor, Hob. 22/11 ("Lord Nelson Mass"), at the 2002 Salzburg Festival and parlayed that successful appearance into roles at the festival by Mozart, Gluck, and Rossini. Since then, Pisaroni's career has focused but not been restricted to Mozart and Handel roles. He has appeared as Figaro at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, as Melisso in Handel's Alcina at the Opéra Bastille in Paris, and in several roles, including Guglielmo in Mozart's Così fan tutte at England's Glyndebourne Festival, among many other major venues.

Pisaroni's recordings have been devoted mostly to Handel and Mozart, including a starring role in conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin's 2015 live recording of Le nozze di Figaro on Deutsche Grammophon. In 2018, however, he appeared in a San Francisco Symphony recording of Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette. Pisaroni received an Opera News award in 2019.