An American tenor of Sri Lankan heritage, Sean Panikkar has made a name for himself above all as an interpreter of contemporary music. He most recently appeared at the Salzburg Festival as Dionysus in Hans Werner Henze’s The Bassarids under Kent Nagano and as Un emigrante in Luigi Nono’s Intolleranza 1960 under Ingo Metzmacher.
His engagements during the 2023/24 season have included his debut at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, as Loge (Das Rheingold) under Antonio Pappano, Alfred (Die Fledermaus) at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich under Vladimir Jurowski, the title role of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam and Leonard Woolf in Kevin Puts’s opera The Hours at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
Other recent engagements have included Laertes in Brett Dean’s Hamlet at the Bavarian State Opera, Un emigrante at the Komische Oper Berlin and Gandhi in Philip Glass’s Satyagraha at the Los Angeles Opera and the English National Opera.
He made his debut at the Vienna State Opera under Philippe Jordan as Drum Major (Wozzeck) and created the role of Adam in the world premiere of Giorgio Battistelli’s CO2 at La Scala, Milan. He has also sung Dionysus at the Komische Oper Berlin, Tobby Higgins (Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny) at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence under Esa-Pekka Salonen, Don José (Carmen) at the English National Opera, Oedipus Rex with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and Edmondo (Manon Lescaut), Brighella (Ariadne auf Naxos), Rodolphe (Guillaume Tell) and Molqi in John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer at the Met.
In concert Sean Panikkar has worked with orchestras including the Houston Symphony Orchestra under Juraj Valčuha, the Philadelphia Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the St Louis Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra under Esa-Pekka Salonen.
