Wei Wu

Grammy Award-winning bass Wei Wu trained at Washington National Opera’s Cafritz Young Artist Program, the People’s University of China, Beijing, and the University of Colorado at Boulder, which recently presented him with the Kalpana Chawla Outstanding Recent Graduate Award. Among his 2025-26 season engagements, he returns to the role of Sarastro in Mozart’s The Magic Flute with Opera San Antonio and rejoins San Francisco Opera for Huang Ruo’s Monkey King, covering Lord Laozi. Future seasons include his debut with the Finnish National Opera. Wu’s 2024-25 season included exciting returns, as he began the season with Los Angeles Opera, singing both Frère Laurent in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette and The Bonze in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. He then sang with Austin Opera for Verdi’s Requiem, debuted with the Shanghai Symphony as Sparafucile in Verdi’s Rigoletto, and brought his celebrated portrayal of Kōbun in Mason Bates’s The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs to Washington National Opera. Wu closed the season with the North Carolina Symphony in performances of Mozart’s Requiem, and at Bard SummerScape singing Benes in Smetana’s Dalibor. Recent engagements include his debut with Los Angeles Opera as Angelotti in Puccini’s Tosca; Frère Laurent at Central City Opera; Sparafucile in Rigoletto with Opera Philadelphia; Hunding in Act 1 of Wagner’s Die Walküre with New Orleans Opera; Marv Carson in the world premiere of Kristin Kuster’s A Thousand Acres and Snug the Joiner in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, both for Des Moines Metro Opera; and performances of Kōbun with Calgary Opera, Utah Opera, Austin Opera, and Lyric Opera of Kansas City. Wei Wu sang Kōbun in the world premiere performances of The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs at Santa Fe Opera. He appears on the cast live recording, which was released by Pentatone and won Best Opera Recording at the 2019 Grammy Awards. His notable operatic engagements include Sarastro, Don Basilio (Rossini’s The Barber of Seville), Colline (Puccini’s La bohème), and Lodovico (Verdi’s Otello) with Washington National Opera; Arnold “Chick” Gandil in the world premiere of Joel Puckett’s The Fix with Minnesota Opera; the Four Villains (Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann), Don Basilio and the Old Hebrew (Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila) at the NCPA Beijing, Timur (Puccini’s Turandot) and Father Trulove (Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress) with Pittsburgh Opera, the Nephew in Garrett Fisher’s Blood Moon with the PROTOTYPE Festival, and Phanuel (Massenet’s Hérodiade) and the Ghost of Nino (Rossini’s Semiramide) with Washington Concert Opera. On the symphonic stage, he has sung Rocco in Beethoven’s Fidelio with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra under Manfred Honeck, Mozart’s Requiem with the Kansas City Symphony under Michael Stern, and Verdi’s Requiem with both The Orchestra Now and the West Virginia Symphony.