Countertenor

Meili Li

L’Olimpiade

Biography

Meili Li is the first Chinese countertenor to have an international career. He is thewinner of the Farinelli Prize (2016) and second prize at the London Handel FestivalSinging Competition (2022). Recent credits include Adone in Salvatore Sciarrino’s Venere e Adone (Hamburg State Opera), Eunuch in Shostakovich’s The Nose (Bavarian State Opera), Oberon in Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream (Hungarian State Opera and Theater Gießen), Orfeo in Gluck's Orfeo e Euridice (Blackwater Valley Opera Festival), Spirito in Monteverdi's L'Orfeo (The RoyalOpera, London), Lian Shanbo in Richard Mills’s The Butterfly Lovers (VictorianOpera Melbourne), Peleo in Fux's Arianna(Styriarte Festival), and the title roles in Handel’s Giustino (Theater an der Wien), Alessandro and Tolomeo (International Handel Festival Karlsruhe and Theater Lübeck), Fernando (London HandelFestival), and Dardano in Handel’s Amadigi (Meiningen State Opera). Venues he has performed in include Carnegie Hall, Barbican Centre, the Concertgebouw and Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, Moscow. He has worked with conductors and stage directors such as Kent Nagano, Vladimir Jurowski, Peter Whelan, Laurence Cummings, Attilio Cremonesi, Maxim Emelyanychev, Federico Sardelli, Alfredo Bernardini, Kirill Sererbennikov, Georges Delnon, Benjamin Lazar, AdrianSchvarzstein, and Graham Vick. He holds a degree in film and philosophy from Peking University, an MA and DipRAM (with distinction) in voice from the RoyalAcademy of Music, where he remains one of the few students to have been awarded full marks for his final recital; and an artist diploma (with distinction) in opera from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama

March 2024.