Since the mid-seventies, internationally known bass-baritone William Powers has assembled a repertoire of over 100 operatic roles with major opera companies in the United States, Europe and South America—very nearly all his assignments are evildoers, devils, villains and rogues. Powers has, in addition, been privileged to be part of many world premieres or important recreations: the 50th anniversary revival of Prokovief’s The Love for Three Oranges, and the premiere of Penderecki’s Paradise Lost for Chicago; Petrassi’s Opus Eighty for Spoleta, Italy; the French revival of Donizetti’s La Favorite for the Opéra Comique and the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris; Bernard Herrmann’s Wuthering Heights for Portland; Pasatieri’s The Seagull for Washington, D.C. and Harbison’s The Great Gatsby for the Metropolitan Opera of New York.

William Powers’s recent seasons have seen him as Death in Der Emperor Von Atlantis, and the Four Villains in The Tales of Hoffmann in Chicago; Le Bailly in Werther in Vienna; Capulet in Romeo and Juliet for Cleveland Opera, and George Benton in Dead Man Walking for Cincinnati.

This season Mr. Powers will travel to San Juan, Puerto Rico for The Damnation of Faust; to Raleigh, NC for Bartolo in the Barber of Seville; and to Bozeman, MT, for Sarastro in Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

William Powers’s solo CD, entitled Rogues and Villains, on the Centaur label, is soon to be followed by a second collection of wicked arias entitled The Worst of William Powers on the same label later this year.

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