Motti Kastón

Motti Kastón was born in Tel Aviv. He studied at the Rubin Academy and at the Manhattan School Of Music in New York. He won first prize in the Pavarotti Competition in 1988, and the Palm Beach international competition. Motti Kastón was chosen  by James Levine for the Met Young Artist Program, where he spent three years before being hired as a principle artist.

In 1991 he came to the Staatsoper Stuttgart as a member of the ensemble, and has since then built a vast repertoire. He has sung Verdi's Rodrigo (Don Carlo), Germont (La Traviata), Ezio (Attila) and Ford (Falstaff), Wagner's Wolfram (Tannhäuser) and Donner (Das Rheingold), Rossini's Figaro (Il Barbiere di Siviglia), Dandini (La Cenerentola) and Blansac (La scala di seta). Other roles include Silvio (I Pagliacci), Marcello (La Bohème), Sharpless (Madama Butterfly), the Count in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, Cipolla in Mario and the Magician by Stephen Oliver (after which he was nominated for singer of the year in Opernwelt magazine), Ottone in L’Incoronazione di Poppea, and many Liederabende and concerts.

His guest engagements have taken him among others back to the MET for Germont, Marcello, and Wolfram, to Venice's La Fenice for Rossini's Il Barbiere di Siviglia and Martinu's  The Epic Of Gilgamesh, to his hometown Tel Aviv (Guglielmo in Così fan tutte, Ford, Dandini, Valentin in Faust), Dresden  (Marcello), Taormina  and Palermo (Carmina Burana),  Montpellier (Orfeo in Monteverdi/Maderna), Paris Opéra Comique (Alfonse in La Favorite), Frankfurt (Figaro), Houston (Enrico in Lucia di Lammermoor), and Philadelphia (Malatesta in L’elisir d’amore) . He is featured as Donner in Rheingold on the Stuttgart Ring DVD, and as Apollon in Alceste in the future DVD release, to be broadcasted on ARTE on April 29th 2006. In 2007 he was requested personally by Peter Konwitschny to guest as Gustl in his new production of Das Land des Lächelns at Komische Oper Berlin.

He has collaborated with conductors such as Leonard Bernstein, Zubin Mehta, James Levine, James Conlon, Gabriele Ferro, Fabio Luisi, Lothar Zagrosek, Julius Rudel, Asher Fish, Gary Bertini, Gennadi Rozhdentsvensky, Enrique Mazzola, Alberto Zedda  and Steven Sloane among others.

Motti Kastón has also sung recitals and concerts in many major cities in America and Europe. His Lied repertoire includes Schubert's Winterreise, Mahler's Kindertotenlieder and Rückertlieder, Berlioz' Les Nuits d'Été, Duparc, Poulenc, de Falla, Brahms, Zemlinski etc.

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