Young South African tenor Levy Sekgapane studied with Kamal Khan and Hanna van Niekerk at the South African College of Music at the University of Cape Town. Even while still a student, he was already taking part in opera productions in South Africa as well as singing in the chorus of the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival and attending masterclasses with Kobie van Rensburg.
Levy Sekgapane first came to international attention when he won first prizes in both the Hans Gabor Belvedere Singing Competition and the Montserrat Caballé Singing Competition. During the 2015/16 season he was a member of the Young Ensemble of the Dresden Semperoper. In 2016/17 he made his debut as Count Almaviva (Il barbiere di Siviglia) with the Deutsche Oper in Berlin and at the Aalto Theatre in Essen, as Ramiro (La Cenerentola) at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich and the Hamburg State Opera and as Count Libenskof in a new production of Il viaggio a Reims at the Royal Opera in Copenhagen.
In the summer of 2017 Levy Sekgapane won the first prize at Plácido Domingo’s Operalia Competition, leading to many invitations to appear at leading international opera houses. In 2017/18 he made his acclaimed debuts at the Liceu in Barcelona as Count Libenskof and at the Paris Opéra as Almaviva. He was also heard as Nemorino (L’elisir d’amore) at the Wiesbaden State Theatre’s May Festival and appeared alongside Olga Peretyatko at a New Year’s Eve Gala under James Conlon at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. He made his Rossini Opera Festival debut as Selimo (Adina) in August 2018, following this up with a number of other important debuts: as Count Almaviva in Santiago di Chile, at the Opéra National de Bordeaux and at the Glyndebourne Festival, as Guido (Enrico di Borgogna) at the Donizetti Festival in Bergamo and as Ernesto (Don Pasquale) at the Latvian National Opera in Riga. He also returned to the Hamburg State Opera for Don Narciso (Il turco in Italia).
Plans for the period after his Salzburg Festival debut in Idomeneo include Count Almaviva in Palermo and Munich, Ramiro in Liège and Munich, Ernesto in Mannheim and Idreno (Semiramide) in Barcelona.
His debut album featuring arias by Rossini with the Munich Radio Orchestra under Giacomo Sagripanti will be released in August 2019.
