Toby Spence

An honors graduate and choral scholar from New College, Oxford, tenor Toby Spence studied at the Opera School of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He was the winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society 2011 Singer of the Year award. Mr. Spence has sung with such orchestras as the Berlin, Los Angeles, and Vienna philharmonics, Bavarian Radio, London, and San Francisco symphony orchestras, and Cleveland Orchestra, and has appeared as soloist at the Salzburg Easter Festival and Edinburgh International Festival. He has worked with conductors including Christoph von Dohnányi, Sir Simon Rattle, Michael Tilson Thomas, Sir Antonio Pappano, Valery Gergiev, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Gustavo Dudamel, Roger Norrington, and Charles Mackerras. As a recitalist, he has sung for BBC Radio 3 and at London’s Wigmore Hall, LSO St Luke’s, Janáček Brno International Festival, and Aldeburgh Festival. He has made recordings for Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, BMG, Philips, Collins, Linn Records, Hyperion, and EMI. Mr. Spence’s 2021-22 season includes role debuts as Wagner’s Parsifal for Opera North and Alwa in Berg’s Lulu for La Monnaie and concert performances of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde with Orquestra Sinfónica do Porto Casa da Música and conductor Stefan Blunier, Jack in Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage with the LPO and Edward Gardner, Mozart’s Requiem with Malta Philharmonic Orchestra and Lawrence Renes, and Elgar’s The Kingdom with the Krakow Philharmonic and Paul Goodwin. Recent opera roles include Aschenbach in Britten’s Death in Venice, Florestan in Beethoven’s Fidelio, Ghandi in Glass’s Satyagraha, Lensky in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, the title role in Gounod’s Faust; Captain Vere in Britten’s Billy Budd, Eisenstein in Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus, and Antonio in Thomas Adès’s The Tempest.