American tenor Matthew Swensen was most recently praised by the BBC for his role debut as Fenton in Verdi's Falstaff in Florence as “Everything we could have hoped for; an ardent and generous tenor… simply phenomenal.”
The 2024–2025 season begins in the summer with Wagner’s Der Fliegende Höllander in his debut at the Teatro Regio di Torino and again with Jaap Van Zweden and the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. He sings several performances of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony with the Allentown Symphony, the Rochester Philharmonic and on tour throughout Italy and Germany. He makes his debut with the Deutscher Symphoniker in Bruckner's Te Deum in Munich and later returns in Bach's B Minor Mass. He makes his role debut as Nemorino in New Orleans Opera's L’elisir d'amore and reprises the role of Count Almaviva in Rossini’s The Barber of Seville with Lyric Opera Kansas City. In April 2025, he will make his Canadian debut with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra in a concert performance of Mozart's Così fan tutte alongside Thomas Hampson as Don Alfonso.
The 2022–2023 season began with the tenor’s American opera debut as Count Almaviva in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia with New Orleans Opera, a debut at the Rheingau Music Festival in Mendelssohn's Lobgesang Symphony, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis with the NDR Orchestra, a Mozart gala concert in Perugia. He also debuted the role of Don Gomez in Weber's rarely performed operetta, Die Drei Pintos, with the Gewandhaus Orchester Leipzig.
Prior to that, Matthew sang Ferrando in Così fan tutte with Adam Fischer (having created this production with Zubin Mehta) as well as Fenton in Falstaff (with Sir John Eliot Gardiner) at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and made his debut at the National Theatre Prague as the Steuermann in a new production of Der Fliegende Holländer, and made several concert appearances in Florence, Dresden and Leipzig with conductors such as Franz Welser-Möst and Alain Altinoglu. In the summer, he made his American concert debut in Mozart’s Requiem at New York’s Mostly Mozart Festival conducted by Louis Langrée.
