Bass-baritone Nicholas Brownlee is the recipient of the 2025 Richard Tucker Award, First Prize at the Hans Gabor Belvedere Singing Competition, the Zarzuela Prize at Operalia, and the Grand Prize of the Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition.
In recent seasons he has appeared at leading opera houses including the Metropolitan Opera, Opéra National de Paris, Wiener Staatsoper, Bayerische Staatsoper, Oper Frankfurt, Opernhaus Zürich, Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, Bayreuth Festival, LA Opera, Dutch National Opera and Palau de les Arts. His engagements include Jochanaan in Salome, Wotan in Die Walküre and Das Rheingold, the title role in Der fliegende Holländer, Kurwenal in Tristan und Isolde, Scarpia in Tosca, Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Amfortas in Parsifal, Méphistophélès in Faust, Escamillo in Carmen, and title roles in Macbeth, Król Roger and Bluebeard’s Castle.
He has collaborated with conductors such as Gustavo Dudamel, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Kent Nagano, Fabio Luisi, James Conlon, Vladimir Jurowski, Simone Young and Susanna Mälkki.
On the concert stage, Brownlee has performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Montreal Symphony Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony and Prague Philharmonia. His repertoire includes Verdi’s Messa da Requiem, Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem, Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn and Stravinsky’s Les Noces.
Brownlee began his career as a member of the Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artist Program at LA Opera, where he appeared in productions including Les pêcheurs de perles, Die Zauberflöte, Madama Butterfly and Moby-Dick. He studied at the University of South Alabama and Rice University.
He made his debut at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in the 2023/24 season with Bluebeard's Castle.