Markus Butter

The Austrian baritone Markus Butter, who was born in 1973 in Bruck an der Mur, acquired his earliest musical training as a member of and soloist with the Vienna Boys’ Choir before studying voice at the Conservatory and, starting in 1994, at the Music University of Graz. He began his professional career as part of the Youth Ensemble at Bavarian Staatsoper and at Deutsche Oper am Rhein; from 2005 to 2015 he was a member of the ensemble at Dresden Semperoper, which awarded him the Christel Goltz Prize in 2009. At present he is a permanent member of Graz Opera, where he performs such roles as Escamillo in Bizet’s Carmen, Kurwenal in Wagner’s Tristan, and the prisoner in Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero. Butter regularly appears at the Theater an der Wien, where he has performed in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Haydn’s Orlando paladino, Johann Strauss’s Fledermaus, and Weill’s Threepenny Opera. He has sung Ottokar in Weber’s Der Freischütz at the Salzburg Festival and has appeared at the Bregenz Festival in HK Gruber’s Tales from the Vienna Woods. His repertoire also extends to such Italian opera roles as Lescaut in Puccini’s Manon Lescaut and Marcello in La bohème and to Germont in Verdi’s La traviata. Markus Butter is additionally a sought-after concert singer. He performed with the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Antonio Pappano in the world premiere of Peter Maxwell Davies’s Symphony No. 10, and he has concertized under Nikolaus Harnoncourt with the Berlin Philharmonic and at La Scala in Milan. Additional credits include with Daniel Harding and the Staatskapelle Dresden, Paavo Järvi and the Orchestre de Paris, Semyon Bychkov and the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, and Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. Markus Butter’s discography comprises Dvořák’s Stabat Mater and Bach’s St. John Passion.

February 2017