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 semifinalist 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 will join the roster of the Butler Studio at Houston Grand Opera, where he will perform and cover various mainstage roles.
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.
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.
Roth has performed in numerous masterclasses with the world’s leading artists and pedagogues. Among these include: George Shirley, Roger Vignoles, Lawrence Brownlee, Gerald Martin Moore, Brian Zeger, Linda Watson, and Marilyn Horne.
In the summer of 2024, Roth looks forward to covering the role of Narraboth in Strauss’ Salome at Des Moines Metro Opera as an Apprentice Artist. Then, for HGO’s 2024-2025 season, he will cover Tony in Bernstein’s West Side Story, and perform Heinrich Der Schreiber in Wagner’s Tannhäuser.
