About
Photo Credit: Morgan Horell
“Roth’s voice soared with each note, highlighting his range”
Biography
Of his February 2024 performance in the role of Male Chorus in Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia at Academy of Vocal Arts, Parterre Box wrote, “An exceptionally promising young tenor, Shawn Roth has a lustrous spinto voice that easily traversed the jagged intervals with precision, and declaimed the text clearly and with dramatic bite.” In December of 2023, he was named a winner in the Pittsburgh District of the Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition, and sang as a semifinalist in the 2024 Houston Grand Opera Eleanor McCollum Competition in January. Shortly after earning his Artist Diploma from AVA in May 2024, he was named a quarterfinalist in the 2024 Neue Stimmen International Singing Competition, and also won First Prize in the Wagner Society of New York‘s 2024 Singers Awards. In fall 2024, Roth joined the roster of the Butler Studio at Houston Grand Opera.
Through his undergraduate studies at Oberlin Conservatory, Roth enjoyed an early professional relationship with the Cleveland Orchestra. He sang the role of Der Lakai in a celebrated production of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos in January 2019, and he returned to Severance Hall in February as a soloist in the Cleveland Orchestra’s Family Concert, The Mozart Experience.
From 2019 to 2021, Roth performed as a fellow at the Music Academy of the West, where he was the recipient of the Lotte Lehmann Memorial Scholarship. There, he began working with renowned pedagogue Bill Schuman, with whom he went on to study with at AVA. It was the second of his two visits to Music Academy where he won the Marilyn Horne Song Competition. He is also a proud alumnus of the Yale Summer School of Music at Norfolk, the Cornish-American Song Institute, the LAH Summer Workshops, and AIMS in Graz, where he was given an Honorable Mention as a Meistersinger Competition finalist.
Throughout his time in the Butler Studio at Houston Grand Opera, Roth has performed various mainstage roles, including Heinrich der Schreiber in Tannhäuser and the Song Seller in il Tabarro. He has also covered Tony in West Side Story, and Kronprinz in Silent Night. In the Butler Studio Showcase, Roth performed scenes from Faust, Carmen, Fidelio, and Die Tote Stadt.
Roth has enjoyed two seasons at Des Moines Metro Opera, where in addition to his performances of Der dritte Jude in Salome and Pásek in The Cunning Little Vixen, he has covered Narraboth (Salome) and Erik (Der Fliegende Holländer).
In the 2025-2026 season, Roth looks forward to performing with his colleagues in the first Butler Studio opera in over twenty years, Carlisle Floyd’s Of Mice and Men, as Curley, in a special tribute to the composer.