Italian baritone Davide Damiani studied voice, double bass, composition and orchestral conducting in Pesaro, Parma and Bologna.
In 1992, he was assistant to Chief conductor Gustav Kuhn in Macerata, which earned him engagements in Italy and Europe. He made his debut as a baritone in a production of Don Giovanni in Tel Aviv.
As a member of the Vienna Staatsoper company from 1995 to 1999, he performed Sharpless (Madama Butterfly), Conte (Le Nozze di Figaro), Belcore (L’Elisir d’Amore), De Siriex (Fedora) with Placido Domingo and José Cura, and Verdi’s Jerusalem with José Carreras conducted by Zubin Mehta (and broadcast on television). Since he has started his freelance career, Davide Damiani has built his solid reputation on roles like Belcore, Don Giovanni, Lescaut (Manon Lescau), Tarquinius (The Rape of Lucretia), Nick shadow (The Rake’s Progress), Musiklehrer (Ariadne auf Naxos), Sharpless, Germont (La Traviata), Edgardo (Lucia di Lammermoor), Marcello (La Bohème), Escamillo (Carmen) Ford (Falstaff), Balstrode (Peter Grimes), and Rigoletto, Amonasro (Aïda), Nabucco, Tonio (I Pagliacci), Michonnet (Adriana Lecouvreur) and Macbeth, Montfort (Les Vêpres siciliennes) and Scarpia (Tosca).
He has worked in the Opera houses in Naples (with Luciano Pavarotti) Torino, Cardiff, Palm Beach, Toronto, Bari, Verona, Palermoi, Bologna, Bergamo, Florence, Ravenna, Genoa, Catania and Modena, Parma, St. Gallen, Tokyo, Berlin, Tel-Aviv, Nice, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and the Royal Opera House Covent Garden.
Davide Damiani has performed with conductors such as Riccardo Muti, Zubin Mehta, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Lorenzo Viotti, Kazushi Ono, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Fabio Luisi, Riccardo Chailly, Anton Guadagno, Renato Palumbo, Carlo Rizzi, Daniel Oren, Roberto Abbado, Phillippe Jordan, and stage directors such as Franco Zeffirelli, Hans Neuenfels, Robert Carsen, Carlo Lievi, David Pountney, Götz Friedrich, Daniele Abbado, Luc Bondy, Graham Vick, Christof Loy…
Recently he has sung Traveler (Death in Venice) at the Nice Opera, the title role in Oedipus by Enescu at the Enescu Festival in Bucharest and at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, and Guillaume Tell (title role, cover) at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, in Krenek’s Diktator (Der Diktator) and Der König (Das geheime Königreich) in Frankfurt, Rigoletto in Hong Kong, Counte de Toulouse (Jerusalem) in Tel-Aviv, Scarpia in Tosca at the St-Margarethen Festival, in Basel and at the Hong Kong Opera, Igor (Fürst Igor) at the Volksoper Wien, Sharpless at the Festival d’Avenches, Don Giovanni in Bucharest, the premiere of Lior Navok’s “An unserem Fluss” at the Oper Frankfurt, Rigoletto at the Korea National Opera in Seoul, Guillaume Tell (title role) at the Teatro Massimo of Palermo, Michonnet at the Oper Frankfurt, Germont in Malmö, Lindorf/ Coppélius/ Miracle/Dapertutto (Les Contes d’Hoffmann) at the Volksoper Wien, Montfort in Bonn, Le marquis de La Force (Dialogues des carmélites) in Frankfurt.
Upcoming performances include Scarpia in Innsbruck and Paolo in the Creation of Giorgio Battistellis Il Teorema di Pasolini at the Deutsche Oper Berlin.
Recordings include Granados’ Goyescas, Piccinni’s Didon and Mercadante’s Il Giuramento as well as Enescu’s Oedipe.