Alastair Miles

Alastair Miles, a British bass born on July 11, 1961, in Harrow, England, has built his career around Verdi operas and the bel canto works that dominated the first half of the nineteenth century. The Guardian in London once described him as “the finest British bass of his generation.”

He grew up without any formal musical training until age fourteen, when he took up the flute under Albert Alan Owen, a former pupil of Nadia Boulanger. Miles later enrolled at the Guildhall School of Music in London, performed for several years as an orchestral flutist, and held teaching posts at leading British institutions. Only after turning thirty did he shift his focus toward singing. Between 1982 and 1985 he served as a lay clerk at St. Albans Cathedral while continuing voice lessons at the Guildhall; his parents’ neighbor, baritone Geoffrey Chard, encouraged him to treat singing as a profession. Following his operatic debut in 1985, Miles received the Decca Kathleen Ferrier Prize at Wigmore Hall the next year. Additional awards quickly expanded his opportunities, leading to engagements at the Metropolitan Opera as Giorgio in Bellini’s I Puritani and Raimondo in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, at the Vienna State Opera as Zaccaria in Verdi’s Nabucco and Philippe II in Verdi’s Don Carlos, and at La Scala as Lord Sydney in Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims.

He has also appeared in concert with many prominent conductors, among them John Eliot Gardiner, and recorded Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis with Gardiner’s Monteverdi Choir. Roughly eighty opera recordings feature his voice; his solo discs include a collection of German lieder by Johannes Brahms and Hugo Wolf. In 2019 he took part in Martyn Brabbins’ recording of Edward Elgar’s early oratorio Caractacus, and he has contributed to several neglected nineteenth-century operas issued by the Opera Rara label.