HUGH RUSSELL
BARITONE
HUGH RUSSELL
BARITONE
ABOUT
Baritone Hugh Russell has performed with The Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Pittsburgh Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Houston Symphony, National Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Milwaukee Symphony, Dallas Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Israel Philharmonic, Danish Radio Symphony, Toronto Symphony, Vancouver Symphony, Orchestre Métropolitain (Montréal), Cincinnati Symphony, and Kansas City Symphony, among many others.
He has been honored to work with many eminent conductors, including Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Jaap van Zweden, Charles Dutoit, Leonard Slatkin, Manfred Honeck, Edo de Waart, Kent Nagano, Donald Runnicles, Steuart Bedford, Michael Christie, Hans Graf, Carlos Miguel Prieto, and Rossen Milanov.
Operatically, he has been featured in productions at Los Angeles Opera, New York City Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Atlanta Opera, Michigan Opera Theatre, Arizona Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, Vancouver Opera, Calgary Opera, Pittsburgh Opera, Manitoba Opera, the Wexford Festival, and Angers-Nantes Opera. Hugh has also been featured in recital at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, and in many appearances with the New York Festival of Song.
As a pianist, he has been featured in performance with Stephanie Blythe at a celebration of the 50th Anniversary of Seattle Opera, and has also been featured in performance with Christine Brewer for Illinois Humanities. In the coming season, Hugh will be featured in performance with pianist Craig Terry, and will return to North Carolina Opera to perform Papageno in Die Zauberflöte. He will also return to the New Mexico Philharmonic to perform his signature work, Orff’s Carmina Burana.
RECENT PRAISE
THE RECORD
Russell embodied the role immediately, conveying deep wells of despair with his broad-barreled vocal prowess. The singer had a particular knack for drama, engaging his entire body in the varied expressions by pulling the audience into the action, engaging empathy through the surrogate experience.
CALGARY HERALD
For this conception to work, the production needs to have singers with the ability to do comedy and to do it simply and naturally. Chief among them is Hugh Russell as Papageno, the comic sidekick to our hero, Tamino. Delivering his spoken lines with a deft comic touch, Russell also sings the part beautifully, with a solid core to his voice and an expert sense of rhythm. The many exchanges with Tamino were wonderfully funny, as is the mock death scene toward the end. Together with Andrea Nunez, a pert Papagena, Russell delivered a show-stopping performance of the famous Papageno-Papagena duet in the second act, as clever and playful as one could ever hope for. Russell never missed a comic trick, a fine performance all around.
INDIANAPOLIS STAR
Hugh Russell handled the more prominent baritone solos [of Faure’s “Requiem”] with admirable restraint, scaling back the operatic heft he had exhibited in the concert’s opening work, Mahler’s anguished song cycle “Songs of a Wayfarer.
TOLEDO BLADE
Hugh Russell launched Adams’ powerful “The Wound Dresser,” a musical setting of Walt Whitman’s account of his Civil War medic duties. Russell was a treat, his rich voice and excellent diction making clear the increasingly horrifying verses.
CONTACT
ALEKSANDAR REUPERT
SENIOR ASSISTANT ARTIST MANAGER
+1 212 994 3540
EMAIL