Biography

Nikolay Borchev was born in 1980 in Pinsk/Belarus. He began his musical training from the age of seven in the disciplines of piano, flute and organ in Moscow. When he was just sixteen years old he began his singing schooling at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, where he studied with Maria Aria and Pavel Lisitsian. In 1998 he won first prize at the "Bella voce" international signing competition in Moscow.

Nikolay Borchev then went on to study at the "Hanns Eisler" Academy of Music in Berlin with Heinz Reeh, Julia Varady and Wolfram Rieger and attended countless master classes, including with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Margreet Honig and Philip Langridge. In May 2002 he won a prize at the "Sylvia Geszty" International Singing Competition in Murcia and took part in the "Festival Academie Européenne de Musique d'Aix-en-Provence" in Summer 2002. The Association for the Promotion of the "Hanns Eisler" Academy of Music also awarded him the first ever "startup!music" prize in 2002.

Even during his studies Nikolay Borchev worked on his extensive repertoire of concerts and songs, which ranges from Bach, to Händel, Brahms, Schubert and Fauré down to Mahler and Pärt.

In 2003 Nikolay Borchev became a member of the Young Ensemble of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, and he was then accepted into the ensemble there during the 2004/05 season. At the Bavarian State Opera he worked with directors like Richard Jones, Peter Mussbach, Christof Loy, Andreas Homoki, David Alden and Robert Carssen, where he performed in roles including Papageno (Die Zauberflöte), Guglielmo (Così fan tutte), Figaro (Il barbiere di Siviglia), Dandini (La Cenerentola), Prosdocimo (Il turco in Italia), Harlekin (Ariadne auf Naxos), Dr. Falke (Die Fledermaus), Mercurio (La Calisto) and Marcello (La bohème). In the premiere of Arnaldo de Felice's Medusa he sang the part of Angelo. In the 2009/10 season he will be making his debut as Barbier in the new production of Richard Strauss' Die schweigsame Frau conducted by Kent Nagano during the 2010 Opera Festival in Munich.

In Summer 2006 he made his first appearance at the Schwetzingen Festival as Pluto in Josef Martin Kraus' Proserpina. At the Salzburg Whitsun Festival in the same year he made his debut in Händel's Das Alexanderfest under René Jacobs. The director then invited Nikolay Borchev to sing in the Mozart Year of 2006 in his production of Don Giovanni at the Innsbruck Festival Weeks for Ancient Music and the Festival Theatre in Baden-Baden, as well as at the subsequent studio recording as Masetto in Harmonia Mundi. In December 2006 Nikolay Borchev debuted as Marcello in Peter Konwitschny's staging of La bohème at the Leipzig Opera House.

In 2007 he made his debut at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels in the role of Moritz for the premiere of Benoît Mernier's Frühlings Erwachen. There he also sang the title role in Monteverdi's Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, as well as taking on roles as Papageno and Dandini. In February 2009 he performed as Monteverdi's Orfeo in a new production by Jan Bosse at the Theatre Basel conducted by Andrea Marcon. In May 2010 this will be followed by a role as Mercurio in Cavalli's La Calisto with the same team.

Further guest appearances led him to locations including the Hamburg State Opera (Figaro in Il barbiere di Siviglia), the Frankfurt Opera (Dandini), the Deutsche Oper am Rhein (German Opera on the Rhine) in Duesseldorf (Monteverdi's Orfeo), the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden (Albert in Werther) and Bilbao Opera (Donald in Britten's Billy Budd).

Future plans include productions at venues such as the Theater an der Wien (Theatre on the Wien River) in Vienna (Ariadne auf Naxos) and the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden in London (Così fan tutte).

To date he has worked with orchestras such as the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, the Academy for Ancient Music in Berlin, the London Mozart Players, the Munich Chamber Orchestra, the Symphony Orchestra of the Saarland Broadcasting Corporation, the RSO and the DSO Berlin. He has sung under the baton of conductors including Zubin Mehta, Kent Nagano, Marcello Viotti, Ivor Bolton, Friedrich Haider, Helmut Rilling, Marek Janowski, Frédéric Chaslin, Christoph Poppen, Bertrand de Billy, Sebastian Weigle and Fabio Armiliato.

Together with the Handel Festival Orchestra Hall Nikolay Borchev has recorded Handel's cantata Apollo e Dafne under the direction of Bernhard Forck.