Born in Leningrad. While still a student at the St Petersburg Conservatoire he was invited to join the Mariinsky Academy of young Singers. Made his debut at the Mariinsky Theatre in Prokofiev’s opera Semyon Kotko, and since 1998 has been a soloist with the Opera Company.
Mikhail Petrenko has won such prestigious international vocal competitions as the Maria Callas Competition, the Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov Competition, the Plácido Domingo Competition and the Elena Obraztsova Competition. To a great degree he owes his emergence as a singer to maestro Valery Gergiev.

The start of Mikhail Petrenko’s international career came with his debut at the Berliner Staatsoper as Hunding (Die Walküre) in 2004 under the baton of Daniel Barenboim. Since then, Mikhail Petrenko has been invited to the world’s leading opera houses and prestigious opera festivals. He has appeared at the Opéra National de Paris, the Metropolitan Opera (New York), La Scala (Milan), the Bayerische Staatsoper and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (London) as well as at the Salzburg Festival, the Aix en Prevence Festival and the BBC Proms concerts held at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

Orchestras with which Mikhail Petrenko has appeared include the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Mariinsky Theatre Symphony Orchestra, the Wiener Philharmoniker, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Salzburg’s Mozarteum Orchestra, Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra and Bavarian Radio Orchestra.

Mikhail Petrenko works with such outstanding conductors as Valery Gergiev, Sir Simon Rattle, Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Christoph Eschenbach, Zubin Mehta and Lorin Maazel. Both the singer’s operatic and concert repertoires are extremely varied. Mikhail Petrenko’s cinematic debut came very recently with the film Juan, based on Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, in which he performed the role of Leporello. The film was premiered at the Hamburg Film Festival in October 2010.

The singer’s future engagements include the roles of Hagen (Götterdämmerung) at the Berliner Staatsoper and La Scala, Figaro (Le nozze di Figaro) at the Metropolitan Opera, Philip II (Don Carlo) and Méphistophélès (Faust) at the Nederlandse Opera in Amsterdam.
In November 2011 he performed the role of Ruslan (Ruslan and Lyudmila) at the reopening of Moscow’s historical Bolshoi Theatre.