In the 2025/26 season Russell Braun made his role debut as Gunther (Götterdämmerung) at La Scala, Milan, and sang in Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem with the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir and in Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra.
In the 2024/25 season he sang Guglielmo (Così fan tutte) at the Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg, Bluebeard (Bluebeard’s Castle) at the Edmonton Opera, the baritone solo in Britten’s War Requiem with the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden under Donald Runnicles and in Carmina Burana at the Festival de Lanaudière with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. In addition, he appeared in the title role of Mendelssohn’s Elijah with the Victoria Philharmonic Choir.
In 2025 he made his professional debut as a conductor at the Edmonton Opera with Jonathan Dove’s arrangement of Die Walküre.
Other recent highlights have included Agamemnon (Iphigénie en Aulide) and Guglielmo at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Mandryka (Arabella) at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Elijah with the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir and Ein deutsches Requiem with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
Other past engagements have included Sam in Bernstein’s A Quiet Place at the Paris Opéra; Peter (Hänsel und Gretel) at the Detroit Opera; the staged Hanns Eisler evening Hell’s Fury, The Hollywood Songbook at the Luminato Festival; Pentheus in Henze’s The Bassarids at the Salzburg Festival; Alfred III in Gottfried von Einem’s Der Besuch der alten Dame at the Theater an der Wien; Figaro (Il barbiere di Siviglia) at the Calgary Opera; the title role of Harry Somers’s Louis Riel for the Canadian Opera Company and with the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa; Speaker (Die Zauberflöte), Don Alfonso (Così fan tutte), Count Almaviva (Le nozze di Figaro), Duke of Nottingham (Roberto Devereux), Count Luna (Il trovatore), Ford (Falstaff) and Peter with the Canadian Opera Company; and Chou En-lai in John Adams’s Nixon in China, Lescaut (Manon Lescaut) and Olivier (Capriccio) at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
Orchestras with which he has worked (along with those already mentioned) include the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Tonhalle Orchestra, Zurich, the Houston Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the SWR Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Amsterdam.
His extensive discography includes a Grammy-nominated recording of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde in Arnold Schoenberg and Rainer Riehn’s version for chamber orchestra, and a recording of Pierre-Louis Dietsch’s Le Vaisseau fantôme under Marc Minkowski, in which he sings the role of Troïl.
