Svatopluk Sem

Biography

Svatopluk Sem, a soloist of the National Theatre Opera in Prague, made his debut at the Prague State Opera in 2008 as Marcello in Puccini's La bohème and the following year on the stage of the National Theatre as the Devil in Bohuslav Martinů's opera The Miracles of Mary.

He studied singing at the Conservatory in České Budějovice. After graduating, he joined the South Bohemian Theatre as an opera soloist. At the National Theatre and the State Opera he has performed, for example, Don Giovanni (Mozart: Don Giovanni), Guglielmo (Mozart: Così fan tutte), Belcore (Donizetti: L’elisir d‘amore), Germont (Verdi: La traviata), Renato (Verdi: Un ballo in maschera), Wolfram of Eschenbach (Wagner: Tannhäuser), Klingsor (Wagner: Parsifal), Gérard (Giordano: Andrea Chénier), the Forester (Janáček: The Cunning Little Vixen), Escamillo (Bizet: Carmen), Smetana's Přemysl (Libuše) and Vladislav (Dalibor). In April 2016, he appeared alongside Karita Matilla at the prestigious BBC Proms Festival at London's Royal Albert Hall as Jaroslav Prus in a performance of Janáček's The Makropulos Affair with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and in the same year in Janáček's Jenůfa as the Mill Foreman. He regularly collaborates with the National Theatre in Brno, the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre in Ostrava and the J. K. Tyl Theatre in Pilsen. He has also appeared as the Forester at the Teatro Regio in Turin. In 2018, he took part in the European opera project OperaVision, where he sang Přemysl (National Theatre Prague) and the Forester (National Theatre Brno).

For Harmonia Mundi, he made a recording of Smetana's The Bartered Bride in the role of Krušina with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 2011. He is the winner of the Opera+ Opera Portal Award 2017, the Thalia Award 2017 (for his portrayal of Giorgio Germont in Verdi's La traviata) and the Moravian-Silesian Jantar Award 2017 (for the role of Kalina in Smetana's The Secret). He has won the Karel Roden Award in České Budějovice three times.