Urs Bühler

Urs Toni Bühler (born 19 July 1971 in Willisau, Lucerne, Switzerland) is a classically-trained tenor. Member since 2004 of the classical crossover group Il Divo, who has sold over 28 million copies worldwide discs.

Career

Early life

His musical training started at the age of five, when Bühler began singing in a choir and also learned to play violin, clarinet, piano, guitar, and drums. His musical career, though, started when he was fifteen in an entirely different genre from lyrical song. He was a member of a cover band and later the lead singer of a heavy metal band called "Conspiracy" when he was seventeen years old in Luzern.

Tenor

At that time, he was already receiving music lessons at the Academy for School and Church Music. His progress in the field led him to move to Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where he studied voice at Sweelinck Conservatorium with Udo Reinemann, a well-known German baritone. Under the private tutoring of Swedish tenor Gösta Winbergh of the Royal Swedish Opera and French tenor Christian Papis, Urs enriched his classical repertoire. He sang in the choir of the Dutch opera and performed in the Salzburg Festival under the direction of Claudio Abbado. Prior to joining Il Divo, he was mainly based in the Netherlands, singing oratorios and performing with the Netherlands Opera Gezelschap (NOG). Despite many performances there are only a handful of recordings available of him before Il Divo.