Thomas Gropper

Baritone Thomas Gropper has appeared in opera and oratorio and has been increasingly active as a choral conductor and voice coach. He is also a significant educator. Gropper was born in 1969 in Braunlage in West Germany's Lower Saxony region. He studied singing and vocal education at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich with Markus Goritzky and also had lessons in Berlin from Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. For the first part of his career, he focused on singing and teaching; he joined the faculty at his alma mater in 1997 and became a full professor there in 2001. Gropper appeared in various Mozart operas and at the Stadttheater Ingolstadt in Simon Mayr's rarely performed Che Originali, and his recording debut came in that work on a recording by the Georgisches Kammerorchester Ingolstadt in 2001. In 2007, he sang the title role in Monteverdi's Orfeo in a production mounted at the ruins of Hersfeld Abby in Bad Hersfeld, Germany. Gropper's main focus as a singer has been in oratorio, where he has sung lead roles in works by composers from Monteverdi to Benjamin Britten. In the second part of his career, he has placed emphasis on choral conducting. He has been the conductor of the chamber choir Arcis-Vocalisten München and has led the group on numerous tours. Gropper also conducted the Fürstenfeld Philharmonic Choir from 2008 to 2014, after which he became artistic director of the Birnauer Kantorei and supervises a sacred music series in Birnau. Gropper is also active as a vocal coach; he has worked with several major German choirs and prepared choirs for live performances of music from the soundtracks for the films The Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean. In 2011, Gropper and Arcis-Vocalisten München began an ongoing association with the Oehms Classics label, releasing an album of Bach cantatas. Gropper has continued to record for the label, issuing albums of music by Bach, Carl Heinrich Graun, and, in 2023, Carl Loewe, of whose Jan Hus Oratorium, Op. 82, he gave the recorded premiere.
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