Internationally celebrated American bass-baritone Ryan McKinny made acclaimed role and company debuts last season at Lyric Opera of Chicago as Joseph de Rocher in Dead Man Walking, later returning to star as Don Giovanni. Other important achievements in recent seasons have included Amfortas in Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival (released on DVD – this portrayal has also been heard at Dutch National Opera); Jochanaan in Salome (Houston); Wotan in Das Rheingold (Montreal); Clarence in John Adams’s Girls of the Golden West (Amsterdam, European premiere – McKinny previously created this role in San Francisco); and the title role of Der fliegende Holländer (Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra). McKinny has also appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in roles of Wagner, Mozart, and Britten; at LA Opera as the Count in Le nozze di Figaro and Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, the latter opposite Renée Fleming; at London’s English National Opera in Handel’s rarely heard Radamisto; and in leading roles with the major companies of Wiesbaden, Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Leipzig, and Basel. McKinny demonstrated his versatility at the Glimmerglass Festival, singing both Wagner’s Dutchman and Billy Bigelow in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel. Important concert engagements include the leading orchestras of Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, among many others. McKinny has won major honors in the Operalia competition and from the George London Foundation. He also represented the United States in the 2007 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition.
