Alastair Miles (Philip II) was born in Harrow, Middlesex, and studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He pursued a career as a flautist and teacher before turning to singing. He won the 1986 Decca Kathleen Ferrier Award and was soon in demand by opera companies, orchestras and recording companies alike.
 
He regularly appears at the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, Milan, La Bastille, Wiener and Bayerische Staatsoper, San Francisco, Netherlands Opera, and in Madrid, Seville, Palermo, Pesaro, as well as (in the UK) the Royal Opera House, English National Opera, Welsh National Opera and Opera North. He has a stylistically wide repertoire, equally at home with Baroque music as he is with the full-blooded romanticism of Verdi, and with the flexibility of voice to encompass both.
 
A highly sought-after concert artist, Alastair has appeared with the world’s most prestigious orchestras and conductors. His discography currently stands at over ninety recordings, including, as part of Chandos’s Opera in English series, a disc of Great Operatic Arias, Mephistopheles (Faust), and Ramfis (Aida). He also enjoys a close relationship with Opera Rara for whom he has recorded Mayr’s Medea in Corinto, Mercadante’s Orazi e Curiazi, Donizetti’s Rosmonda d’Inghilterra, Meyerbeer’s Margherita d’Anjou and Thomas’La Cour de Célimène and shares their aim of bringing the delights of neglected nineteenth-century Italian and French opera to a wider public. Alastair Miles lives in Cambridge with his wife and three children.