In his lifelong singing career, the American tenor Robert White has sung for five U.S. Presidents, Britain’s Queen Mother and Prince Charles, Monaco’s Royal Family, and Pope John Paul II. 

He has recorded extensively for RCA, EMI, Virgin, Sony, Arabesque and Hyperion with colleagues Yo-Yo Ma, Samuel Sanders, Placido Domingo, William Bolcom, Joan Morris, Graham Johnson, and Stephen Hough in music ranging from Beethoven to Richard Rodgers and Edouard Lalo.

The tenor’s musical versatility is expressed in a vast range of song and opera beginning in the 1940’s and 50’s, when he sang and acted on NY radio with such luminaries of his childhood years as Bing Crosby, Fred Allen, Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart, Beatrice Lillie, Kate Smith, and Bob Hope. 

Robert studied voice first in Rome, then with Sergius Kagen and Beverley Peck Johnson at the Juilliard School where he received his Masters Degree in Voice in 1968.  He studied on full scholarship with the legendary Nadia Boulanger at Fontainebleau, France. 

Robert’s classical career began in earnest in 1959 when he was tenor soloist at Carnegie Hall with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic.  He then joined Noah Greenberg’s New York Pro Musica as soloist, touring the US and Europe in highly acclaimed performances of Medieval and Renaissance music. 

Opera performances include works of Handel, Mozart, Smetana and Bizet with the Wexford Opera, the Monte Carlo Opera, and the Arizona Opera, among others. He premiered Paul Hindemith’s opera “The Long Chrismas Dinner” under the composer’s direction.  

Robert White has achieved particular success for his singing of Irish Songs. As the son of American-born tenor Joseph White (known as The Silver Masked Tenor on early NBC radio) and an Irish born mother, this gift came quite naturally to Robert.  In 1984, when the BBC was preparing a 100th Anniversary tribute to the life of the world famous Irish tenor John McCormack, they chose Robert to present the story of McCormack's career and to sing many of his most famous arias, ballads, and Irish songs.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Robert sang ‘Songs of the 21st Century’ in a program of modern works written especially for him by some of America’s most celebrated composers, including Gian Carlo Menotti, William Bolcom, John Corigliano, Ned Rorem, Lowell Liebermann, Richard Hundley, Libby Larsen, Sheldon Harnick and Thomas Z. Shepard, Ben Moore, and Milton Babbitt.    

To this day, Robert White maintains a highly successful singing and teaching career.  He taught voice at the Manhattan School of Music from 1986 to 1990, and has been a member of the Juilliard Voice Faculty since 1991.  He is also on the CUNY Doctoral Voice Faculty.

In the course of Robert White's long and distinguished singing and teaching career, many honors have come the tenor’s way.  These include the William Schuman Scholars Award from Juilliard, as well as the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society’s Award for Artistic Excellence.  Mr. White is on the Morgan Library Music Advisory board, The Metropolitan Museum’s Musical Instruments Committee, and currently serves as a Trustee of The Bagby Foundation for the Musical Arts.