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The Italian baritone, Andrè Schuen, 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. He 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 master-class sessions with, among others, Kurt Widmer, Sir Thomas Allen, Brigitte Fassbaender, Marjana Lipovšek and Olaf Bär.
After graduating with distinction in 2010, Andrè Schuen earned critical acclaim as one of the few performers to appear throughout Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s 2014 celebrated cycle of W.A. 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, joined the festival’s Young Singers Project. He was a member of Graz Opera from 2010 to 2014 and made his debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker and Sir Simon Rattle in 2011. Other past highlights on the concert stage include appearances with the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln under Jukka-Pekka Saraste or the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Daniel Harding. Together with Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Markus Hinterhäuser he performed at the Salzburg Whitsun Festival.
His repertoire embraces everything from Lieder and opera to traditional Ladin folk music and spans the spectrum of human emotions. Above all, it reflects the singer’s passion for words and his determination to convey their meaning in performance. Critics have been inspired by Andrè Schuen’s combination of vocal authority, tonal warmth and expressive intelligence. “This dark, unstrained baritone is one of the most beautiful things you can hear at the moment; it is an unreservedly wonderful voice,” observed the Frankfurter Rundschau, while Gramophone has praised his enormous expressive range and ability to spin “long, quiet lines that flow with consummate ease”. In December 2019 the Stuttgarter Zeitung published an interview in which Andrè Schuen outlined his down-to-earth attitude to his profession and deep love for art song. “Career is a secondary word for me,” he declared. “Opera and song are equally important to me,” he added, “but song offers me greater freedom as an artist.” That sense of freedom is rooted in Schuen’s 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.
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 W.A. Mozart's Così fan tutte (director: Christof Loy / musical direction: Joana Mallwitz) at the Salzburg Festival in 2020; and J.S. Bach's Weihnachts-Oratorium (BWV 248) with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Andris Nelsons. In early 2020 he made his debut as Eugene Onegin with the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon. In September 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 (musical direction: Tomáš Hanus / production: Dmitri Cherniakov). During the season he can also be seen and heard here as Marcello in La Bohème, Count Almaviva in W.A. Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro and Papageno in W.A. Mozart's Die Zauberflöte.
As a lied singer, Andrè Schuen is on stage of London’s Wigmore Hall in November 2020 with a world premiere of Thomas Larcher and songs by Korngold and, and in May 2021 with the same programme at the Schubertiade Hohenems, where he is one of the regular guests. The Schöne Müllerin is the focus of a tour in March 2021 with stops in Munich, Vienna, Madrid, Barcelona and Warsaw. Further recitals will take him to Elmau, Bolzano, Merano, as well as to Paris and Orleans with the Quatuor Diotima.
With his Lied partner Daniel Heide, Andrè Schuen can be heard worldwide in Lied centres such as London's Wigmore Hall, the Schubertiade, the Schubertiada Vilabertran, at the Heidelberger Frühling or the Oxford Lieder Festival, as well as at renowned concert venues such as Munich's Prinzregententheater, Amsterdam's Concertgebouw or the Vienna Konzerthaus. With Andreas Haefliger, he made his USA debut in 2017 with recitals at the Tanglewood Festival and the Aspen Music Festival. Together with Daniel Heide, he received the best international reviews for his recordings. His latest releases on the label AvI are "Petrarca Sonnets" by Franz Liszt and "Wanderer" with songs by Schubert. Before that he presented songs by Robert Schumann, Wolf and Martin as well as works by L.v. Beethoven, which he recorded with the Boulanger Trio. His artistry, matured over time, has led to an exclusive agreement with Deutsche Grammophon. For his DG debut album, set for release in March 2021, he has recorded Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin with pianist Daniel Heide. This will be followed by albums devoted to Schubert’s two other late song-cycles, Winterreise and Schwanengesang. He marked the start of his new relationship with the Yellow Label in early August 2020 with the online release of his interpretation of “Ungeduld” from Die schöne Müllerin for DG’s Musical Moments series.
Andrè Schuen’s future plans include concerts with Quatuor Diotima in Paris and Orléans and appearances as Papageno in Die Zauberflöte at the Wiener Staatsoper (April 2021); the title-role in Le Nozze di Figaro at the Aix-en-Provence Festival (July 2021); and return appearances as Guglielmo at the Salzburg Festival followed by performances of Die schöne Müllerin, Winterreise and Schwanengesang with Daniel Heide at the Schubertiade in Schwarzenberg & Hohenems (August). |
