Finnish tenor Tuomas Katajala is one of the most versatile and sought-after Scandinavian tenors and has achieved noticeable success not just as an opera singer, but as a concert singer as well. He studied at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki as well as in Rome and Amsterdam and has a longstanding and close relationship with the Finnish National Opera in Helsinki and the Savonlinna Opera Festival, where he made his stage debut as Tamino/Die Zauberflöte. Following this, he was accepted into the master class at the Accademia Rossiniana and undertook the role of Libenskopf in Il Viaggio a Reims under the baton of Alberto Zedda at the Rossini Festival in Pesaro.

Past seasons’ opera highlights include, among others, Tamino/Die Zauberflöte at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Staatsoper Unter den Linden Berlin and Opéra de Lille, Almaviva/Il barbiere di Siviglia at Komische Oper Berlin, Ferrando/Così fan tutte at Seattle Opera, Steuermann/Der fliegende Holländer in Helsinki and in a concert performance with the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, Don Ottavio/Don Giovanni at Finnish National Opera, as well as Belmonte/Die Entführung aus dem Serail at the Savonlinna Opera Festival.

In 2019, he made his debut as Max in Der Freischütz on the occasion of a concert tour with concerts in Vienna, Brussels, Caen, Luxemburg, Aix-en-Provence and at Ludwigsburger Schlossfestspiele. This engagement marked a change in repertoire and was followed by debuts as Loge/Rheingold at the Finnish National Opera and Idomeneo in Tel Aviv.

Katajala’s vast concert- and oratorio repertoire includes the key works by J.S. Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bruckner, Mahler and Britten. He sang at different music festivals in the USA (i.a. Avery Fisher Hall in New York), France (Salle Pleyel in Paris), Germany (Laeiszhalle Hamburg), Scandinavia, Spain, the UK (Glyndebourne Festival), and Japan.

Tuomas Katajala worked together with conductors such as Vladimir Ashkenazy, Kent Nagano, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Mikko Franck, Klaus Mäkelä, Susanna Mälkki, Eivind Gullberg Jensen, Hannu Lintu, and Santtu-Matias Rouvali.

Engagements in the season 2021/22 include the new productions of Don Giovanni/Don Ottavio at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre and Braunfels’ Die Vögel/Hoffegut in Strasbourg and Mulhouse, as well as Zauberflöte/Tamino in Tampere.

On the concert stage he can be heard in Stravinsky’s Renard with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Nicholas Collon, in Schnittke’s Faust Cantata with Rome’s Accademia di Santa Cecilia and Antonio Pappano, as Ferrando in a concert version of Così fan tutte with the Kammerakademie Potsdam under Antonello Manacorda, in Dvorak’s Stabat Mater with the Orchestre de Pau Pays de Béarn, as well as in Bach’s St John Passion with the Orquestra Gulbenkian in Lisbon.

In the season 2022/23 Tuomas will be on stage as Tamino/Zauberflöte at the Finnish National Opera as well as in Savonlinna, and as Max/Der Freischütz at Theater an der Wien, among others. In addition, he can be heard in Beethoven’s Symphony no 9 with the Wiener Symphoniker under Klaus Mäkelä, in Britten’s “Serenade for tenor and horn” with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and as Loge in a concert performance of Rheingold in Singapore.