Benjamin Bruns began his singing career as an alto soloist with the boys’ choir in his hometown Hanover. After four years of private singing lessons with Prof. Peter Sefcik, he began his studies at the Academy of Music and Theatre in Hamburg with Kammersängerin Renate Behle. Whilst still a student he was offered his first permanent engagement at Theater Bremen which allowed him to build up a wide-ranging repertoire at an early stage. This was soon followed by an ensemble contract at the Cologne Opera, and he later continued his professional journey at the Semperoper Dresden before joining the ensemble of the Vienna State Opera, where he remained until July 2020.
His musical range includes Mozart roles such as Belmonte (Die Entführung aus dem Serail), Tamino (Die Zauberflöte) and Don Ottavio (Don Giovanni), but also important other repertoire such as Fenton (Falstaff), Camille de Rosillon (Die lustige Witwe), Lysander (Britten: A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Don Ramiro (La Cenerentola), Boris Grigorievič (Janáček: Kátia Kabanová), or the Italian Tenor in the two Strauss operas Capriccio and Der Rosenkavalier. With Wagner roles such as Lohengrin, Loge (Das Rheingold) and Erik (Der fliegende Holländer), or Max in Der Freischütz and Matteo in Strauss’ Arabella, the expansion into the youthful dramatic field is becoming apparent. In spring 2020, he appeared for the first time on the stage of the Vienna State Opera as Florestan in Beethoven’s Fidelio.
At the start of the 2022/2023 season, Benjamin Bruns made a guest appearance as Erik in a new production of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer at the Hamburg State Opera. In Munich he was heard as Guido Bardi in Zemlinsky’s Eine florentinische Tragödie together with the BR Radio Orchestra. At the Zurich Opera House he appeared again as Max in Freischütz, and in a concert performance of Act 1 of Wagner’s Walküre in Wuppertal he sang Siegmund for the first time.
Oratorio and recitals form an equally important side to Benjamin Bruns’ career. At the heart of his extensive concert repertoire are the great sacred works by Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and Mendelssohn. He has sung with many renowned ensembles including the Berlin Philharmonic, the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic, the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, the Bach Collegium Japan, the WDR Symphony Orchestra, the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, as well as the choir and orchestra of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome.
The 2022/23 season also held interesting projects and showed the full range of Benjamin Bruns’ repertoire: Hans Huber’s Weissagung und Erfüllung in Basel, Lloyd Webber’s Requiem in Munich, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in Tokyo as well as in Paris, Antwerp and Hamburg, van Gilse’s Circle of Life in Utrecht, Mahler’s 8th Symphony in Leipzig and Mozart’s Requiem in Bilbao. In a tour of the Netherlands, he performed Bach’s St Matthew Passion in concerts in Eindhoven, Groningen, Rotterdam, Utrecht and Naarden, among others.
Benjamin Bruns is a prize winner of the Bundeswettbewerb Gesang in Berlin, the Mozart Competition in Hamburg and the International Singing Competition of the Schloss Rheinsberg Chamber Opera. He was also the recipient of the 2008 Kurt Hübner Prize awarded by the Theater Bremen and the 2009 Young Musicians’ Prize awarded by the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival.
His Lied CD Dichterliebe with Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Der arme Peter, Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte and Hugo Wolf’s Liederstrauß (accompanied by Karola Theill) was highly praised by the press and nominated at the International Classical Music Awards as well as for the German Record Prize in the category ‘Vocal Recital’. His most recent CD, Schubert’s Winterreise, accompanied by Karola Theill, was released in spring 2021.
