Kwangchul Youn
Born and educated in Korea, Kwangchul Youn joined the ensemble of the Berlin State Opera in 1993. He remained a member of the ensemble until 2004, having presented a large selection of his wide-ranging repertoire. In 2018 he was named Berlin Kammersänger.
Kwangchul Youn’s engagements during the 2018/19 season included Ferrando (Il trovatore) at the Bavarian State Opera, King Henry (Lohengrin) and Jacopo Fiesco (Simon Boccanegra) at the Vienna State Opera, Sarastro (Die Zauberflöte) and Veit Pogner (Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg) at the Berlin State Opera as well as Gurnemanz (Parsifal) at the Hamburg State Opera. He also sang Mahler’s Eighth Symphony under Kirill Petrenko in Bregenz.
In recent years, Kwangchul Youn has been much in demand at all the major opera houses throughout Europe and overseas, including the Vienna State Opera, the Berlin State Opera, La Scala, Milan, the Metropolitan Opera, New York, the Bavarian State Opera, the Semperoper Dresden, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the Liceu in Barcelona, the Paris Opéra, the Frankfurt Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Teatro Regio in Turin. He has also performed as a guest at many festivals, including the Bayreuth Festival, the Salzburg Festival, the Salzburg Easter Festival, the Ravinia Festival in Chicago and the Beethovenfest in Bonn.
As well as his operatic engagements, Kwangchul Youn also appears frequently in concert with leading orchestras such as the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, the Netherlands Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon, the Filarmonica della Scala and the NHK Symphony Orchestra Tokyo, as well as at the BBC Proms.
His recordings including Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg under Daniel Barenboim on Teldec, Croesus with René Jacobs on Harmonia Mundi, Fidelio on Teldec, Le nozze di Figaro, Così fan tutte, Don Giovanni and Tiefland under Bertrand de Billy on Arte Nova and Daphne with WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne under Semyon Bychkov on Decca, which was nominated for a Grammy for best opera production of 2006.