| Biography | Sanford Sylvan is an American baritone, born in New York City in 1953. A graduate of the Manhattan School of Music, he made his Glyndebourne Festival debut in 1994 as Leporello in Don Giovanni by Mozart.
He has performed with many leading conductors, opera companies and orchestras including Houston Grand Opera, San Francisco Opera, New York City Opera, the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouworkest, Melbourne Symphony and the NHK Symphony. He has performed at the Edinburgh, Marlboro, Tanglewood, Vienna, Holland, Oregon Bach and Carmel Bach festivals.
Sylvan received Grammy and Emmy awards for the role of Chou En-Lai in Nixon in China by John Adams and received five additional Grammy nominations: Fussell's Wilde (2009); Adams's The Wound-Dresser (1990), which was written for Sylvan; Fauré's L'horizon chimérique (1999); Beloved That Pilgrimage (1992); and the soundtrack for the Penny Woolcock Film of Adams' opera, The Death of Klinghoffer (2003). He has premiered a number of works by Adams, Philip Glass, Peter Maxwell-Davies, John Harbison and Christopher Rouse.
A frequent collaborator with the director Peter Sellars, he appeared in Sellars' re-imaginings of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte and Le nozze di Figaro, aforementioned operas of John Adams and, in 2009, Adams's A Flowering Tree presented at Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival. Along with his performing schedule, he is also a professor of voice at The Juilliard School and McGill University Schulich School of Music in Montréal, Canada. |