Biography

Simon Keenlyside is a baritone with an international career, performing a wide range of operatic roles ranging from the Baroque to world premieres. He has recorded for major labels, including Sony Classical, EMI, and Hyperion. Keenlyside was born on August 3, 1959, in London. His father was a noted violinist who performed with the Aeolian Quartet, and his maternal grandfather was the violinist Leonard Hirsch. Keenlyside sang as a boy chorister with the Choir of St. John's College, Cambridge University, attending the choir's boarding school. He attended Cambridge as a zoology student but was drawn back to singing, serving as a choral scholar at St. John's. Keenlyside went on to the Royal College of Music in Manchester on a Peter Moores Foundation scholarship, studying with John Cameron. Steeped in German lieder, he also sang Lescaut in Puccini's opera Manon Lescaut while still a student, and his career has been divided between opera and song. His professional debut came in 1988 at the Hamburg State Opera in Germany, and the following year, he appeared at Covent Garden in London in Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci. In the early '90s, he was a member of the cast of the Scottish Opera. Keenlyside made his recording debut in 1994, appearing on the album An 1815 Schubertiad - II in the Hyperion Schubert Edition series. His solo debut came two years later with the EMI release Richard Strauss: Lieder Recital, accompanied by Malcolm Martineau. Since the mid-'90s, Keenlyside has been seen on top operatic stages in Britain, continental Europe, and the U.S. In New York, he made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1996 as Belcore in Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore, and in the '90s, he appeared at La Scala in Milan in several Mozart roles. Keenlyside has an unusually wide-ranging repertory that includes two operas of which he appeared in the world premieres, as Prospero in Thomas Adès' The Tempest in 2004 and as Winston Smith in Lorin Maazel's 1984 in 2005. He frequently performs in orchestral concerts and has had a long career as a lieder singer, making four more appearances in Hyperion's Schubert series and issuing other important vocal albums, including 2011's Songs of War, again with Martineau as accompanist. Keenlyside's versatility was shown by the 2014 Chandos release Something's Gotta Give, featuring selections from the Broadway musical repertory. In 2023, Keenlyside released the album Jonathan Dove: In Exile with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra on the Lyrita label. ~ James Manheim, Rovi