Benjamin Bruns began his singing career as an alto soloist in the boys’ choir of his hometown Hanover. After four years of private vocal training with Prof. Peter Sefcik, he studied at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg with Kammersängerin Renate Behle. While still a student, he received his first permanent engagement from the Bremen Theater, which enabled him early on to build up a wide-ranging repertoire, soon followed by an ensemble contract at the Cologne Opera. From the Saxon State Opera in Dresden, his path led directly to the Vienna State Opera, where he was a member of the ensemble from 2010 to 2020.
His stylistically and vocally versatile repertoire includes Mozart roles such as Belmonte (Die Entführung aus dem Serail), Tamino (Die Zauberflöte) and Don Ottavio (Don Giovanni), as well as parts such as Fenton (Falstaff), Camille de Rosillon (The Merry Widow), Lysander (Britten: A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Don Ramiro (La Cenerentola), Boris Grigorievič (Janáček: Kátia Kabanová) and the Italian Tenor in both Strauss operas Capriccio and Der Rosenkavalier. With Wagner roles such as Lohengrin, Parsifal, Loge (Das Rheingold), Erik (Der fliegende Holländer), and Siegmund (Die Walküre), as well as Max in Weber’s Der Freischütz, the Emperor in Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, and Florestan in Beethoven’s Fidelio, Benjamin Bruns has successfully made the transition to the youthful dramatic repertoire.
Oratorio and lieder singing form an important counterpart to his stage work. The focus of his extensive concert repertoire lies in the great sacred works of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Mendelssohn. In this field, he performs with all major German orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, as well as with renowned international orchestras such as the Vienna Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Bach Collegium Japan, the Czech Philharmonic, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, and the Choir and Orchestra of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome.
The 2025/26 season brings exciting projects and showcases the full breadth of Benjamin Bruns’ repertoire: Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde takes him to Antwerp, Aalborg, and Granada. He performs Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra under Vladimir Jurowski. With the Berlin Philharmonic under Kirill Petrenko, he appears both in Berlin and at the Salzburg Easter Festival with Mahler’s Eighth Symphony. In Ghent, Antwerp, and Vienna he can be heard as Parsifal, and in Munich as Florestan (Fidelio). A concert performance of Elektra takes him to Hamburg. He makes his role debut as Siegfried in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung in a concert performance under Patrick Hahn in Wuppertal.
His song CDs Dichterliebe (with Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Der arme Peter, Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, and Hugo Wolf’s Liederstrauß) and Winterreise, both with Karola Theill at the piano, were highly praised and awarded by the press. In 2024, a new recording of Haydn’s The Creation under Marek Janowski was released by Pentatone. The same work was released in 2025 under Sir Simon Rattle on BR-Klassik’s in-house label.
For more information, please visit the artist's website: www.benjaminbruns.de
