Javier Camarena
From: Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico.
LA Opera: Nadir in The Pearl Fishers (2017); recital with pianist Ángel Rodríguez (2019).
Career highlights: Mexican tenor Javier Camarena is the preeminent Mozart and bel canto specialist of his generation. Praised for his burnished tone, gleaming high notes, flawless coloratura and veracious portrayals, he regularly appears in leading roles alongside today’s foremost stars at the world’s top opera houses.
Javier Camarena began the 2021/22 season with a recital tour in Mexico together with pianist Ángel Rodríguez. Further concerts and recitals took him to Puerto Rico and Chicago (at the Harris Theater). In December, to honor the centenary of tenor Enrico Caruso’s death, he gave a concert in homage to the great singer together with the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, conducted by Riccardo Frizza at the Sala Cecilia in Rome. Another recital tour brought him and pianist Ángel Rodríguez to Spain, with concerts in Barcelona, San Sebastián, Zaragoza and the Balearic Islands. He is now traveling the U.S., with recitals in Florida with Opera Naples, with the Dallas Opera as well as in Los Angeles. He will finish his concert season with a gala concert at the Tio Pepe Festival in Jerez de la Frontera (Cádiz, Spain). On the operatic stage, the tenor was seen in November as Nemorino in L’Elisir d’Amore at the Gaetano Donizetti Theatre in Bergamo, Italy, beginning a longstanding collaboration for upcoming seasons of the Donizetti Festival. Coming up this season, he performs Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor at the Metropolitan Opera, concert performances as Gualtiero in Bellini’s Il Pirata at the Zurich Opera House, and Tamino in The Magic Flute at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. He ends the season with four performances of L’Elisir d’Amore at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires.
In recent seasons, Camarena once again showed his great diversity in opera roles and as a concert performer. At the Paris Opera, after his great success as Ernesto in Don Pasquale, he sang Arturo in I Puritani and starred at the Opéra National de Paris in highly appraised performances of The Daughter of the Regiment. He made his highly anticipated debut at the Teatro Real Madrid in Il Pirata. He returned to the Zurich Opera House as Don Ramiro in La Cenerentola, before also performing this role at the Metropolitan Opera. As part of the Met Stars Live in Concert series, he performed in a New Year’s Eve gala, live from Augsburg, Germany. He sang a gala concert at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow and travelled to Spain for a gala concert at the 35th Festival Castell de Peralada. Further concert engagements brought him to the Opéra de Monte-Carlo, Teatro Real and Auditorio Nacional in Madrid, Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, the Palau in Valencia and to Oviedo, Murcia and San Sebastian.
It was at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City that Camarena made his professional debut, as Tonio in a 2004 staging of The Daughter of the Regiment, and he has since returned to the house for three further productions. In 2007, he joined the ensemble of the Zurich Opera. Four years later, he made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera as Almaviva in The Barber of Seville, one of his signature roles. Other roles include Don Ramiro in La Cenerentola, the title role of Le comte Ory, Belmonte in The Abduction from the Seraglio, Ferrando in Così fan tutte, Fenton in Falstaff and Elvino in La Sonnambula. Equally celebrated for appearances at San Francisco Opera, Dresden’s Semperoper and the Vienna and Bavarian State Operas, the tenor has collaborated with such eminent conductors as Claudio Abbado, Marco Armiliato, Maurizio Benini, Bruno Campanella, Giuseppe Finzi, Daniele Gatti, Faio Luisi, Zubin Mehta, Evelino Pidò and Franz Welser-Möst.
His discography includes three solo titles for Sony: Recitales (2014), Serenata (2015), and a Latin pop album titled Javier Camarena Canta a Cri Cri (2016). In 2018, Decca released his highly acclaimed album Contrabandista. He also appears on numerous operatic DVD/Blu-ray releases including Così fan tutte and Le comte Ory from the Zurich Opera and Falstaff from the Salzburg Festival.
Javier Camarena studied with mezzo-soprano Cecilia Perfecto at the Universidad Veracruzana before completing his musical studies with honors under Hugo Barreiro and Maria Eugenia Sutti at the University of Guanajuato. In 2004, he took first prize in Mexico’s Carlo Morelli National Singing Competition, and the following year he won the Juan Oncinas Award at Barcelona’s Francisco Viñas Competition, after which he was invited to join Zurich’s International Opera Studio under the mentorship of fellow tenor Francisco Araiza. In 2021, he was honored by the International Opera Awards as “Male Singer of the Year.”
Learn more at JavierCamarena.com.
