The greek born tenor Mario Zeffiri enjoys a global career that has taken him to the most prestigious opera houses in Europe.
In Italy he has performed at La Scala in Milan, in Rome, Turin, Bologna, Florence, Trieste, Venice and Naples. In Germany he has sung at opera houses in Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne, Essen and Düsseldorf, as well as Hamburg, Leipzig and Dresden; in France at the Opéra de Paris and the Opéra Comique, the opera houses in Bordeaux, Nice, Montpellier, Toulon and Avignon, as well as at ‘La Monnaie’ in Brussels and in Liège.
He has also performed at the MET in New York, at the Stanislavsky & Nemirovich-Danchenko Theatre and the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, at the Mariinsky Theatre Concert Hall in St. Petersburg as well as in Tallinn, the Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv, the Liceu of Barcelona and in Santiago de Chile, Glasgow, Stockholm, Malta, Beijing and Athens.
Mario Zeffiri has an opera repertoire that includes more than 50 leading roles in addition to a broad song and concert repertoire. This – as well as his regular engagements at renowned festivals such as the ‘Festival de Radio France’, ‘Maggio Musicale Fiorentino’ and the ‘Salzburger Festspiele’, at concert halls from the ‘Wiener Musikverein’ and the Berlin Philharmonic to Carnegie Hall and the Chicago Symphony Center – led him to work with esteemed conductors such as Riccardo Muti, Nello Santi, Roberto Abbado, Bertrand de Billy, Daniele Gatti, Gianluigi Gelmetti, Jesús López Cobos, Stefan Soltesz, Daniel Oren, Eve Queler and Alberto Zedda, and – in the field of early music – with René Jacobs, Helmut Rilling and Philippe Herreweghe, as well as with world-renowned stage directors such as Hugo de Ana, Dario Fo, Pier’Alli, Pierluigi Pizzi and Luca Ronconi.
A particularly significant milestone in his career was his Grammy Award-winning recording of Verdi’s Requiem and the recording of Berlioz’s Fantastic Symphony – Lélio, both with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Riccardo Muti.
Recently Zeffiri has been expanding his repertoire to include Wagner and Strauss roles, thereby increasingly venturing into the “German Fach”. In addition he is passing on his extensive experience to the younger generations of singers he teaches, as part of his professorship at the Detmold University of Music.