The Sydney-born rising star baritone carries all before him with performances of Handel and Keiser.

Australian baritone Morgan Pearse has won the 7th Annual International Cesti Voice Competition for Baroque Opera in the Austrian town of Innsbruck. The second prize and the audience prize went to Austrian mezzo-soprano Sophie Rennert, while American countertenor Eric Jurenas came in third place.

^{Sophie Rennert, Eric Jurenas, Morgan Pearse}

Pearse, who trained as a studio artist at Houston Grand Opera and graduated from the Royal College of Music’s International Opera School carried of the first prize with an aria from Handel’s Rinaldo and an aria from Reinhard Keiser’s little-known opera Octavia. “Each year the Cesti Competition selects a core group of composers focussed on a particular part of the vast and rich pool that exists in the Baroque Opera genre. This time it was generally composers writing in Italian with Cavalli, Monteverdi, Vivaldi and Handel most popular,” Pearse told Limelight. “The first round and semi final rounds are entirely up to you but in the finals there was a prescribed list of arias which each voicetype had to select from. One...