Benjamin Bruns

German tenor Benjamin Bruns began his singing career in the boys’ choir of his native city of Hanover. Following private singing lessons with Peter Sefcik, he studied at the Hamburg Academy of Music with Renate Behle and, while still a student, was engaged at the Bremen Theater, where he developed a broad lyric tenor repertoire. Engagements at Cologne Opera and the Saxon Staatsoper in Dresden eventually led him to the Vienna Staatsoper in 2010, where he remained a member of the ensemble until 2020. Bruns performs such Mozart roles as Belmonte (The Abduction from the Seraglio), Tamino (The Magic Flute), and Don Ottavio (Don Giovanni) but has also appeared in Italian roles, as Lysander in Britten’s A Midsummer Night's Dream, and as Boris Grigorjevič in Janáček’s Kát'a Kabanová. He has ventured into more dramatic vocal parts by singing such Wagner roles as Lohengrin, Loge (Das Rheingold), Erik (The Flying Dutchman), and Siegmund (Die Walküre), Max in Weber’s Der Freischütz, and Florestan in Beethoven’s Fidelio. In the 2024-25 season, Benjamin Bruns can be heard as Piet vom Fass in Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre at the Bavarian Staatsoper and in Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, among other roles. He makes his role debut as the title figure in Parsifal in Hamburg and sings the Drum Major in Berg’s Wozzeck for the first time as well in Tokyo. An important counterpart to his work on the opera stage is singing oratorios and lieder, with an emphasis on the great sacred works of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Mendelssohn. He performs with such orchestras as the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. This season, his engagements include Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang under Masaaki Suzuki; Mahler’s Eighth Symphony under Philippe Jordan, Marko Letonja, and Cornelius Meister; and Das Lied von der Erde with the Berliner Philharmoniker and Daniel Barenboim.

November 2024