A two-time 2006 Grammy Award Winner (including Best Classical Recording), Panamanian-American baritone Nmon Ford most recently performed both Scarpia (Tosca) and the title role in a new production of Billy Budd with Hamburg State Opera.
Ford made his Ravinia Festival debut with James Conlon conducting the Chicago Symphony in Shostakovich's Symphony #13 (Babi Yar), a piece he also sang with Maestro Conlon and the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Disney Concert Hall. Having begun his musical training in piano at age three, he has since appeared with Hamburg Opera, San Francisco Opera, Los Angeles Opera, Spoleto Festival USA, Utah Opera, and Portland Opera in the lead baritone roles in Don Giovanni, Otello, Tristan und Isolde, Tosca, Parsifal, Aïda, La Traviata, Carmen, and Samson et Dalila. Other roles include Posa (Don Carlo), Jochanaan (Salome) and Telramund (Lohengrin).
Ford has appeared with the New York Philharmonic, the Atlanta Symphony, the Pittsburgh Symphony, the National Symphony and the Orchestra of St. Lukes’s, and performed with conductors Leonard Slatkin, Kent Nagano, Simone Young, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Robert Spano, and Marin Alsop. He has recorded for Telarc (Grammy-winning composer Jennifer Higdon’s Dooryard Bloom, written for Mr. Ford), Naxos (Bolcom’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience) and Koch (Villa Lobos’ Symphony #10, “Amerindia”), and he has upcoming engagements with Hamburg Opera (Billy Budd, Billy Budd), Virginia Opera (Conte di Luna, Il Trovatore) and Cincinnati Opera (Riolobo, Florencia en el Amazonas).
