Andrew Munn, bass

Das sagt der/die Künstler:in:

Andrew Munn is a bass and collaborative artist. He performs and creates opera, chamber music, oratorio, performance, and multidisciplinary art. He lives in Berlin.

He has given world premieres at venues including Carnegie Hall, Deutsche Oper Berlin, München Biennale, and National Sawdust, and sung principal roles at the Salzburg State Theater (Sarastro, Die Zauberflöte), Innsbrucker Festwochen der Alten Musik (Atrace, L'Empio Punito), Szczecin Opera (Frère Laurent, Romeo et Juliette). As the anti-hero protagonist of Deutsche Oper Berlin and the München Biennale's joint-production of Lieder von Vertreibung und Nimmerwiederkehr, his performance was called "masterful"(BR Klassik) in a production of which the Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote "art cannot achieve more."

Andrew's lyric bass carries a gravitas informed by musical, social, and ecological values. From 2008 to 2014, Andrew lived in the mountains of central Appalachia working as a leading organizer in a constellation of community resistance to mountaintop removal coal mining. His work on land reform, economic transition in coal-dependent areas, and civil disobedience was published and analyzed in the Journal of Appalachian Studies and Applied Anthropology; books published by Punctum, AK, Virginia Tech, and Atlantic Monthly Presses; and was featured in documentaries including The Last Mountain and Battle for Blair Mountain on CNN.

A desire to interrogate questions of ecology, history, and power through the arts brought Andrew to the singer’s path. He trained at The Juilliard School, Bard College, and the University of Michigan, studying with Sanford Sylvan, Dawn Upshaw, Stephen West, and George Shirley. As an associated artist of the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel, he has enjoyed the mentorship of José van Dam and Sophie Koch. He has been a fellow of the Aspen Summer Music Festival and School (2006, 2014, 2015), the Tanglewood Music Center (2017), Caramoor (2016), and Opera Theatre of St. Louis (2018).

Drawn to the intimate intensity of the song repertoire, Andrew has become a sought-after interpreter of major song cycles with pianists including Jacob Greenberg, Peter Grunberg, Christopher Guzman, Adam Rothenberg, Rami Sarieddine, and Bálint Zsoldos. He has given Franz Schubert's Winterreise at The Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur, Northwestern University in Chicago, L'Arte Academy of Music in Nicosia, and Bard College in New York. He has performed Dmitri Shostakovich's rarely heard Suite on Verses by Michelangelo at the Hungarian State Opera and the Berlied Festival, where the work was presented alongside the German art historian Julia Modes’ lecture on the reception Michelangelo's works by 20th century abstract painter Cy Twombly. He premiered Berlin Verses, his adaptations of Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht's Hollywooder Liederbuch, at the Music Barn in New York and the LiedFest Berlin-Oxford curated by Dietrich Henschel. For this work, he was an invited artist of Berlin Akademie der Künste and Haus für Poesie's series Re-Imagining the Lied in 2023.

Within a multidisciplinary network of artists, performers, activists, and scholars, Andrew develops new works and critical contexts for canonic repertoire. With the sound artist Kat Austen, he is developing postWinterreise, as a duet between Schubert's Winterreise and an evolving soundscape of our changing climate, ecology, and society. The team will be 2024 artists in residence of Hogfish to develop and workshop the piece. This project is one of a suite of performance works for which Andrew was selected as a participant of the 2023 Beth Morrison Projects Producer Academy. He is currently developing works with composers Andile Khumalo, Andys Skordis, Conrad Winslow, and Nina C. Young; sound artists Kat Austen and Ira Hadžić; multidisciplinary artists & theorists Marco Donnarumma, Kilian Jörg, Timo Kreuser, and Margherita Pevere; and the poet Alla Gutnikova. These collaborations have been supported and produced in Berlin by Berliner Festspiele and Hauptstadtkulturfonds, Neustart Kultur; in Vienna by Volkstheater Wien, and Kunstquartier Wien; and by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, Les Ateliers de la Main d'Or in Paris, and the Gennadius Library in Athens.

He maintains a private voice studio for singers and public speakers in Berlin. As a Juilliard Global Teaching Artist, he has given masterclasses in Nord Anglia International Schools in Abu Dhabi, Budapest, Lausanne, and Warsaw.

In an ongoing commitment to movements for social and environmental justice, Andrew serves on the board of the renown Highlander Center for Research and Education. In this role, he acts as a link between cultural organizers across the globe.