William Shimell

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William Shimell (born September 23, 1952 in Brentwood ( Essex )) is a British opera singer ( baritone ) and film actor.

Life

William Shimell was a member of the boys' choir at Westminster Abbey and the choir at St. Edward's School in Oxford. He was trained as a singer by Ellis Keeler at the Guildhall School of Music in London and at the National Opera Studio .

His international career as an opera singer began in 1980 with his debut at the English National Opera as Masetto in Mozart's opera Don Giovanni . Shimell has since enjoyed an international reputation as a Mozart singer. He was considered an ideal embodiment of Don Giovanni , whom he sang for the first time in 1984 at the Welsh National Opera . In the following year and in 1987 he sang the role at the English National Opera, then in Amsterdam (1988) and Zurich (1993, under the direction of Nikolaus Harnoncourt ), in Munich (Bavarian State Opera, 1994) and in Berlin, Frankfurt a. M., Madrid, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Santiago de Chile (1989), Lyon, at the Glyndebourne Festival and the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence .

After a career as an opera singer that lasted more than thirty years, which took him to almost all the major opera houses in the world, he began a second career as a film actor with the lead role in his debut film Die Liebesfälscher . The director Abbas Kiarostami had entrusted him with the role after working with him in Aix-en-Provence in 2008. In Kiarostami's production of Mozart's Così fan tutte , he sang Don Alfonso. Michael Haneke gave him a second film role in his film Liebe and a little later also signed him as Don Alfonso in his famous Madrid production of Cosi fan tutte , with Silvain Cambreling at the podium. Shimell's Don Alfonso, as the critics attest to him, is “not an ironic philosopher, but a cynic with a screwed-up inner life, sung elegantly as an actor [...]”.

repertoire

His repertoire includes, in addition to Don Giovanni, Papageno in the Magic Flute , Guglielmo and Don Alfonso in Così fan tutte , Count Almaviva and Figaro in The Marriage of Figaro . Other roles in his repertoire are Dandini in Rossini's La Cenerentola , Sharpless in Madama Butterfly , Malatesta in Don Pasquale and Hercules in Handel's oratorio of the same name.

Discography (selection)

Filmography

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ William Shimell in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  2. ↑ Time online September 27, 2012, accessed November 22, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Shimell, William
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British opera singer (baritone) and film actor
DATE OF BIRTH September 23, 1952
PLACE OF BIRTH Brentwood ( Essex )