Ryan de Ryke, baritone, is an artist whose versatility and unique musical presence have made him increasingly in demand on both sides of the Atlantic. He has performed at many of the leading international music festivals, including the Aldeburgh Festival in the UK and the festival at Aix-en-Provence in France. The Baltimore Sun hailed him as “a talent that seems to defy labels, for without pretense or vocal tricks he delivers a naturally beautiful sound that penetrates to one’s inner core in every conceivable range.” Mr. de Ryke appears regularly as an oratorio soloist and has worked with many early music ensembles, including the Orchestra of the 17th Century, the Baltimore Handel Choir, the Bach Sinfonia, the Ciciliana Quartet, and the American Opera Theater. His operatic roles include the title roles in Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and Blow’s Venus and Adonis, and Giove and Mercurio in Cavalli’s La Calisto. He portrayed Nardo in Mozart’s La Finta Giardiniera with the Bay Area Summer Opera and Oberon in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He made his Weill Recital Hall debut as a finalist with the New York Oratorio Society and later returned to the Zankel hall as a finalist in the Marilyn Horne master class competition. Mr. de Ryke studied at the Peabody Conservatory with John Shirley-Quirk, the Royal Academy of Music with Ian Partridge, and the National Conservatory of Luxembourg with Georges Backes. He is also an Alumnus of the Britten-Pears Institute in the UK and the Schubert Institute in Austria, where he worked Elly Ameling, Wolfgang Holzmair, Julius Drake, Rudolf Jansen, and Helmut Deutsch. A founding member of the Baltimore Lieder Weekend, he is a frequent performer on WFMT Chicago. He collaborates regularly with Daniel Schlosberg, Eugenia Cheng, Eva Mengelkoch, Michael Shepard, Susan Youens, and Roger Vignoles.