Mikhail Petrenko was born in 1976 in St Petersburg, where he studied at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory, amassing a repertoire of some thirty Russian and other rôles. After winning prizes at the Rimsky-Korsakov Competition for Young Singers in St Petersburg and at the Maria Callas Competition in Parma (Nuove voci per Verdi) he became a guest artist of the ensemble of the Mariinsky Theatre under the direction of Valery Gergiev, with the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Teatro Real in Madrid, the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, and the Salzburg Festival, where he participated in concert performances of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh (2000) and Prokofiev’s War and Peace (2004). In 2003 in the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden Mikhail Petrenko was heard in the Ring des Nibelungen under Gergiev, as Fafner and Hagen.

His repertoire also includes Sarastro, the Padre Guardiano (La forza del destino), Ramfis (Aida), König Heinrich (Lohengrin), Daland (Der fliegende Holländer), and Varlaam (Boris Godunov), which he sang in Bilbao, Genoa, the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin, and the Opéra de Paris. Conductors under whom Mikhail Petrenko has worked also include Zubin Mehta, Daniel Barenboim and James Levine. He was heard as Hunding in Wagner’s Walküre at the 2007 Aix-en-Provence Festival under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle.