Andrè Schuen

Making music comes as naturally to Andrè Schuen as speech. The baritone, raised in a family of multilingual musicians, communicates as fluently with melody as he does in German, Italian and Ladin, the regional tongue of the part of the South Tyrol in which he was born in 1984. Having studied cello as a child, he later switched his focus to singing and won a place at the Salzburg Mozarteum where he studied with the Romanian soprano Horiana Brănişteanu and received lessons in Lieder and oratorio from fellow baritone Wolfgang Holzmair. His formative training also included masterclass sessions with, among others, Kurt Widmer, Sir Thomas Allen, Brigitte Fassbaender, Marjana Lipovšek and Olaf Bär. His repertoire embraces everything from Lieder and opera to traditional Ladin folk music and spans the spectrum of human emotions, stemming from his early experience playing and singing Ladin folk music as part of a family ensemble that also included his mother, father, two sisters and a cousin. The group created a bridge between the artificial divide that all too often separates the complementary worlds of classical and folk song. Critics have been inspired by Schuen's combination of vocal authority, tonal warmth, and expressive intelligence and as his artistry continued to mature, it led to invitations to perform on the world's leading stages, as well as to an exclusive agreement with Deutsche Grammophon. Schuen earned critical acclaim as one of the few performers to appear throughout Nikolaus Harnoncourt's 2014 cycle of Mozart's Da Ponte operas at the Theater an der Wien, for which he sang the roles of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Guglielmo. His partnership with pianist Daniel Heide has flourished in concert and on disc, and he has also given critically acclaimed recitals with Thomas Adès, Andreas Haefliger and Gerold Huber. In 2009, he appeared as singer and actor at the Salzburg Festival in Luigi Nono's Al gran sole carico d'amore and, the following year, he joined the festival's Young Singers Project. Schuen was a member of Graz Opera from 2010 to 2014 and made his debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker and Simon Rattle in 2011. Highlights of recent seasons include recitals at London's Wigmore Hall, the Vienna Konzerthaus and the Schubertiade in Schwarzenberg & Hohenems; Guglielmo in a new production of Così fan tutte at the Salzburg Festival in 2020; and J.S. Bach's Christmas Oratorio with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Andris Nelsons. In 2020, he made his Bayerische Staatsoper debut, again in the role of Guglielmo, and a month later made his Wiener Staatsoper debut in the title role of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin.