Johannes Martin Kränzle - Baritone/Bass
Biography
Before concentrating on singing, the Augsburg born baritone Johannes Martin Kränzle he started studying music theatre director. As a student of Martin Gründler at the Music Academy in Frankfurt am Main, he successfully took part in various singing competitions, before accepting his first engagements in Dortmund and Hannover. Since 1998 he has been a member of the Frankfurt Opera, where he sang his first Wolfram (Tannhäuser), Tomsky (Pique Dame), Grjaznoi (Die Zarenbraut), Heerrufer (Lohengrin), Giovanni Morone (Palestrina) and all the important Mozart roles. Here he worked together with directors such as Keith Warner (Death in Venice), Christof Loy (Paolo in Verdi’s Simone Boccanegra and Don Alfonso in Così fan tutte) and Nicolas Brieger (Henze’s Boulevard Solitude and Das verratene Meer). In several productions (Bern, Cologne, Leipzig) this versatile artist has sung the title part in Offenbach’s Orpheus in der Unterwelt and as a studied violonist also played the violin solo himself.
He was engaged to Cologne Opera for Meistersinger (Beckmesser), Das schlaue Füchslein (Forester), Bluebeard’s Castle (Bluebeard) and Prokofieff’s War and Peace (Andrej Bolkonski), and in 2011 he was awarded the Cologne Opera Prize. For his interpretation of Beckmesser in Cologne he was nominated for the theatre award Der Faust in 2010.
Guest appearances led him to e.g. San Francisco Opera (Papageno/Zauberflöte and Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise), Hamburg State Opera (Count in Le Nozze di Figaro, Mahagonny) Bavarian State Opera (Guglielmo, Papageno, the Secretary in Henze’s The Young Lord), Geneva (Korngold’s Tote Stadt, Eisenstein/Die Fledermaus and The Merry Widow by Lehar), as well as to the Salzburg Festival (Valens in Theodora in 2009 and Nietzsche in the world premiere of Dionysos by Wolfgang Rihm). Recently he sang Beckmesser at Glyndebourne Festival Opera under the baton of Vladimir Jurowski. He made his debut as Alberich in Rheingold of the new Ring at Scala Milan and the Berlin State Opera under Daniel Barenboim.
In addition to opera, Kränzle is devoted to Lieder and oratory singing. He has given concerts at the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, Paris’ Nôtre Dame, Cologne Cathedral, Festival of Vilnius, Budapest Spring Festival and the Expo 2000 in Hannover. Since 1997, he regularily teaches as a honorary guest professor at the Brazilian universities of Paraiba and Rio Grande de Norte. His chamber opera Der Wurm was awarded in Berlin in 1997 and the world premiere took place there at Opera Neukölln. His first solo Lied CD (Die Mitternacht zog näher schon) was published by Oehms Classics with ballads by Loewe, Schumann, Schubert, Mahler, Wolf and Busoni.
Future engagements include a.o.: Musiklehrer (Ariadne auf Naxos), Eugene Onegin and Mandryka (Arabella) at the Cologne Opera, Gunther (Götterdämmerung) and Prus (Janacek’s The Makropulos Case) at Frankfurt Opera, in the role of Alberich continuation of the Ring at La Scala and Berlin State Opera (Siegfried and Götterdämmerung), Gunther at Geneva Opera, Prince in Tchaikovsky’s Sorceress at Theater an der Wien as well as Beckmesser (Meistersinger) at the Met New York. In 2011, he was chosen “Singer of the Year” for his interpretation of Alberich at La Scala and in Berlin as well as for his extraordinary performance in the world premiere of Wolfgang Rihm’s Dionysos (named “world premiere of the year”) at Salzburg Festival.
Last updated: 07.11.2011© We kindly ask you to seek our approval for any alteration or abbreviation of the biography. Thank you for your kind understanding.