Biography

Ali Leone began his training at the Young Singers Academy of the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, where he spent five years, and took his bachelor’s degree at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory in the same city. He continued on the postgraduate assistantship programme at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, and took a master’s degree at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.

From 2011 to 2013 he was a leading soloist at the Helikon Opera in Moscow. There he sang Don José in Carmen, Sergei in Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, the Pretender in Boris Godunov and Claudio in Wagner’s Das Liebesverbot — the Russian premiere of that opera, staged by Dmitry Bertman under Vladimir Ponkin in October 2011.

In 2015–16 he was engaged as a soloist at the Theater Bonn, where he sang the Fourth Jew in a new production of Richard Strauss’s Salome, conducted by Stefan Blunier. Between 2016 and 2019 he worked as a soloist in Vienna, where his roles included Lensky in Eugene Onegin, Don José and Cavaradossi in Tosca.

From 2019 to 2022 he sang with the chorus of the Salzburg Festival, taking part in productions of Verdi’s Aida, Simon Boccanegra, Luisa Miller and the Requiem; Puccini’s Il tabarro, Suor Angelica and Tosca; Janáček’s Káťa Kabanová, Boito’s Mefistofele, Enescu’s Œdipe, Cherubini’s Médée, Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, Strauss’s Elektra and Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust. Since 2023 he has been a member of the chorus at the Bühne Baden in Austria, appearing in Wiener Blut, Die Csárdásfürstin, Giuditta, Die Zirkusprinzessin and Tosca.

Alongside the opera stage he works extensively in concert. In December 2014 he gave a recital at the Kumyk Theatre in Makhachkala — his first appearance in Dagestan — with a programme built deliberately around the less-travelled repertoire rather than the familiar hits: arias by Puccini, Cilea, Verdi and Giordano in the first half, Neapolitan songs by Tosti, De Crescenzo, De Curtis and Di Capua in the second, accompanied by the pianist Zarifa Abdullaeva.

He lives in Vienna and sings in Russian, Italian, German, French and English. Theatre credits and reviews from earlier years appear under his given name, Ali Magomedov — the name he still uses in Russia («Али Магомедов»).