Ryan Allen - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Ryan Allen is an American bass singer known for his operatic character roles. He debuted at the Metropolitan Opera

Metropolitan Opera

The Metropolitan Opera is an opera company, located in New York City. Originally founded in 1880, the company gave its first performance on October 22, 1883. The company is operated by the non-profit Metropolitan Opera Association, with Peter Gelb as general manager...

in 1993 as Hans Foltz in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is an opera in three acts, written and composed by Richard Wagner. It is among the longest operas still commonly performed today, usually taking around four and a half hours. It was first performed at the Königliches Hof- und National-Theater in Munich, on June 21,...

by Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...

. The singer has performed professionally in all 50 states, appeared with numerous American opera companies, and sung as a soloist in Russia, Israel, Poland, Norway and Sweden. Coming to Opera from the field of acting, the bass's repertoire favors roles with character development and stage movement. These roles range from the comic Don Basilio in Il barbiere di Siviglia

The Barber of Seville

The Barber of Seville, or The Futile Precaution is an opera buffa in two acts by Gioachino Rossini with a libretto by Cesare Sterbini. The libretto was based on Pierre Beaumarchais's comedy Le Barbier de Séville , which was originally an opéra comique, or a mixture of spoken play with music...

by Gioacchino Rossini

Gioacchino Rossini

Gioachino Antonio Rossini was an Italian composer who wrote 39 operas as well as sacred music, chamber music, songs, and some instrumental and piano pieces...

to the pathetic Candy

Of Mice and Men

Of Mice and Men is a novella written by Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck. Published in 1937, it tells the tragic story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers during the Great Depression in California, USA....

in Of Mice and Men

Carlisle Floyd

Carlisle Floyd is an American opera composer. The son of a Methodist minister, he based many of his works on themes from the South...

by Carlisle Floyd

Carlisle Floyd

Carlisle Floyd is an American opera composer. The son of a Methodist minister, he based many of his works on themes from the South...

. Allen has also appeared as an oratorio soloist with various symphony orchestras and oratorio societies. In 1989 he debuted at Carnegie Hall

Carnegie Hall

Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....

, singing the bass solos in Mozart's

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart , was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music...

Requiem.

Allen is a lyric bass capable of singing the deepest pitches composed in opera. He has performed the role of Seneca in L'incoronazione de Poppea by Monteverdi, which requires a low D. He has also established himself as a versatile singer by performing not only in opera and oratorio, but also in the musical theater field (Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd) and the operetta field in Gilbert and Sullivan roles, such as the title character in The Mikado. Further versatility was demonstrated in the musical style of Kurt Weill

Kurt Weill

Kurt Julian Weill was a German-Jewish composer, active from the 1920s, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht...

, when he sang A Kurt Weill Cabaret with the late Martha Schlamme

Martha Schlamme

Martha Schlamme was born Martha Haftel to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria in 1923. Forced to flee to France in 1938 after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, Haftel soon after joined her family in England, where they were then interred as 'enemy aliens' on the Isle of Man...

. He has participated in several world premieres, including Holy Blood and Crescent Moon by Stewart Copeland

Stewart Copeland

Stewart Armstrong Copeland is an American musician, best known as the drummer for the band The Police. During the group's extended hiatus from the mid-1980s to 2007, he played in other bands and composed soundtracks...

with the Cleveland Opera, and The Cask of Amontillado by Russell Currie with the Bronx Arts Ensemble, as well as at Golden Fleece, Ltd. and Symphony Space in New York City. Caliban, a monodrama by Russell Currie using the words of the character Caliban from Shakespeare's The Tempest
The Tempest
The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place,...

, was written for and dedicated to him. Ryan Allen can be heard as Elviro on a 1994 recording of Handel's Xerxes

Serse

Serse is an opera seria in three acts by George Frideric Handel. It was first performed in London on 15 April 1738. The Italian libretto was adapted by an unknown hand from that by Silvio Stampiglia for an earlier opera of the same name by Giovanni Bononcini in 1694...

(Koch Schwann), in recordings of Russell Currie's music on the High Fire label, and seen as Betto on a video of Gianni Schicchi
Gianni Schicchi
Gianni Schicchi is a comic opera in one act by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Giovacchino Forzano, composed in 1917–18. The libretto is based on an incident mentioned in Dante's Divine Comedy. The work is the third and final part of Puccini's Il trittico —three one-act operas with...

(Metropolitan Opera Guild). He graduated with a B.A. in English from Austin College in Sherman, Texas and an M.M. from the University of Texas at Austin. He lives in the Greater New York vicinity in Edgewater, New Jersey

Edgewater, New Jersey

Edgewater is a borough located along the Hudson River in Bergen County, New Jersey. As of the 2010 census, the borough had a population of 11,513...

External links

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