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.” The First Prize Winner of the 2024 Wagner Society of New York's Singer Awards and the 2021 Marilyn Horne Song Competition, Roth has also won awards in The Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition, the Meistersinger Competition, the Houston Saengerbund, the Eleanor McCollum Competition, and Neue Stimmen. 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. 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, AIMS in Graz, and Des Moines Metro Opera's Apprentice Artist Program.
In May 2022, Roth was invited to partake in a special collaboration with L2 Artists to perform the role of Don José in La tragédie de Carmen at Velaa Private Island in the Maldives, where he sang for opera-lovers from all the world over.
During the 2023-2024 season, Roth sang the role of Male Chorus in The Rape of Lucretia at Academy of Vocal Arts, and Dritte Jude in Salome with Des Moines Metro Opera, where he also covered the role of Narraboth.
Roth's 2024-2025 season includes Heinrich der Schreiber in Tannhäuser, (Houston Grand Opera), covering Tony in West Side Story (Houston Grand Opera), Don José in Carmen (Corpus Christi Symphony Orchestra), and a solo recital with the Wagner Society of New York. In the summer of 2025, he looks forward to returning to Des Moines Metro Opera, where he will sing the role of Pašek in The Cunning Little Vixen and cover Erik in Der fliegende Holländer.