The bass-bariton Egils Silins was born in Latvia and graduated from the Latvian Academy of Music. He made his debut at the Latvian National Opera in 1988, performing in ‘Mephistopheles' (Boito). He has won ten international competitions and received the Latvian Annual Music Aware in 1996 and 2003.
After engagements at the Frankfurt opera and Basel opera, he became soloist at the Wiener Volksoper with an acclaimed debut as Mephisto in Gounod's ‘Faust', followed by the leading role ‘Boris Gudonov' directed by Harry Kupfer. He made his debut at the Wiener Staatsoper in ‘I Puritani'. Other roles at the Wiener Staatsoper included the title role in ‘Mephistopheles' (Boito), Silva in ‘Ernani', Raimondo in ‘Lucia di Lammermor', Rodolfo in ‘La Sonnambula', Escamillo in ‘Carmen' and Procida in ‘Sicilian Vespers'. He gained huge international acclaim singing the title role in ‘Le Demon' (Rubinstein) at the 1997 Bregenz festival. He has also performed at numerous prestigious music festivals including The Tanglewood Music Festival, Savonlinna Opera Festival and the Glyndebourne Festival.
Egils Silins has performed at many of the world´s leading opera houses, including La Scala, Metropolitan Opera, Hamburgische Staatsoper, Semperoper, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Teatro del Liceu, Mariinsky Theatre, Opernhaus Zürich, Chicago Opera, Staatstheater München, among others.
His repertoire (more than 70 roles), include: Holländer/Fliegender Holländer, Wotan/Rheingold/Walküre, Wanderer/Siegfried, Klingsor/Parsifal, Johannaan/Salome, Barak/Woman without Shadows, Orest/Elektra Demon/Demon, Rangoni/Boris Godunov, Gd. Prêtre/Samson et Dalila, Mephisto/Faust and Damnation de Faust, Sebastiano/Tiefland, Scarpia/Tosca and Germont/Traviata.
His most recently engagements include among others the Ring Cycle and Salome at the Opernhaus Zürich, Rheingold and Walküre at the Opera de la Bastille, Fliegende Holländer at Teatro Real, Deutsche Oper Berlin and Semperoper and Siegfried and Tiefland at Deutsche Oper Berlin, Salome at Royal Opera House Covent Garden.
He has worked with world’s renowned conductors as Andrew Davis, Colin Davis, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Marcello Viotti, Christian Thielemann, Phillipe Jordan, Christoph von Dohnányi, Zubin Mehta, Ricardo Mutti, Fabio Luisi, Seiji Ozawa, Vladimir Fedosseyev, Neeme Järvi, Mariss Jansons, Andris Nelsons, Sebastian Weigle, Kazushi Ono, Gennady Rozhdestvensky and Mstislav Rostropovich.