Born in Glasgow, he trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.
Opera productions include Faust, Die Zauberflöte and Rigoletto (Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, all shown on BBCTV, DVD recordings), Les contes d´Hoffmann (Salzburger Festspiele and TV), Carmen (Glyndebourne, BBCTV and DVD, Diapason d'Or award), Billy Budd (Lyric Opera of Chicago), Macbeth (Mariinsky Theatre, Covent Garden, Kennedy Center, Metropolitan Opera), Semele and L´incoronazione di Poppea (Théâtre des Champs Elysées, Paris, and Strasbourg), Agrippina (La Monnaie, Brussels, and the Théâtre des Champs Elysées, Paris), A Midsummer Night´s Dream and Don Giovanni (La Monnaie); for the English National Opera La clemenza di Tito, Tosca, The Rape of Lucretia (Aldeburgh Festival and BBCTV), Alcina (also Bilbao and Oviedo) and Manon (also New Zealand, Dallas and Houston), La bohème (Glyndebourne and Channel 4 television), Der Rosenkavalier, Don Giovanni, Sweeny Todd, Hamlet, Il re pastore (Opera North), Madama Butterfly, Der Rosenkavalier, Idomeneo (Scottish Opera), Les contes d´Hoffmann, Idomeneo (Vlaamse Opera, Antwerp), Fidelio (New Zealand International Festival of the Arts) and Tamerlano (Deutsche Oper am Rhein, Düsseldorf). Rigoletto and The Rape of Lucretia were both nominated for Olivier awards in 2002.
