The bass-baritone Stephan MacLeod was born in Geneva and studied piano and violin at the Geneva Conservatoire, subsequently training as a singer with Ursula Buckel and then at the Cologne Musikhochschule under Kurt Moll. In 1990 he embarked on a professional career, with an award of the Bourses Bonardel, giving Lieder recitals in Geneva, Cologne, Bonn, Paris and Venice, and in 1994 received further awards from the Zurich Ernst Göhner Foundation and the Hamburg FVS. He has since then appeared in a wide repertoire of opera and oratorio under conductors of the greatest distinction, with performances throughout Europe, in the United States and in Japan and Israel, in addition to a number of recordings.