Simon O'Neill Tenor

Biography

Tenor Simon O’Neill was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for his services to opera in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. He is a Fulbright Scholar, holds a Doctor of Music (h.c) from Victoria University of Wellington and is an alumnus of the University of Otago, the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School.

O’Neill has performed at prestigious houses such as the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Berlin Staatsoper, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Vienna Staatsoper, Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, Hamburg Staatsoper, London's Royal Opera House and major festivals including Bayreuth, Glyndebourne, and Salzburg. He has worked with many of the world’s leading conductors, including Daniel Barenboim, James Levine, Valery Gergiev, Riccardo Muti, Christian Thielemann, Fabio Luisi, Kirill Petrenko, Simone Young, Daniele Gatti and Andris Nelsons.

His operatic repertoire includes the title roles in Parsifal and Lohengrin at the Bayreuth Festival, as well as Siegfried, Tristan, Tannhäuser, Otello, and Idomeneo. He is also acclaimed for his portrayals of Siegmund in Die Walküre, Siegfried in Götterdämmerung, Florestan in Fidelio, Boris in Katya Kabanova, the Emperor in Die Frau ohne Schatten, and Mao in Nixon in China.

In concert, O’Neill has performed Siegmund in Die Walküre with the Berlin Staatskapelle, Berliner Philharmoniker, New York Philharmonic, New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, and Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Fidelio under the baton of Antonio Pappano (Rome), Edo de Waart (Hong Kong), Simone Young (Sydney), and Daniel Barenboim (Salzburg), Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass have included collaborations with Pierre Boulez (London/Paris), Pietari Inkinen (Prague), and Sir Simon Rattle (Berlin) and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde at Carnegie Hall with Levine, the Barbican with Pappano and the Eighth Symphony in Montreal, Madrid, Paris, Tokyo, Sydney and Edinburgh.

O’Neill has recorded Siegfried with three orchestras: Sir Simon Rattle and the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks (2023), the Hallé Orchestra with Sir Mark Elder (2020), and Jaap van Zweden with the Hong Kong Philharmonic for their Naxos Ring Cycle recording (2018). His recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 with Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic for Deutsche Grammophon won a Grammy Award.

Recent engagements include his role debut as Loge in Das Rheingold with Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He performed Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder with the Sydney Symphony, the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester and Alan Gilbert and with the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks under Sir Simon Rattle. O'Neill also returned to the Helsinki Philharmonic for Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 with Jukka-Pekka Saraste. On the opera stage, he sang Lohengrin with Sofia Opera, made his role debut as Tannhäuser in Tokyo, and performed the title role in Tristan und Isolde with the San Francisco Opera under Eun Sun Kim.

Paris Opera debut: Parsifal (2022)

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