Keith Lewis CNZM

Tenor




New  Zealand-born Keith Lewis was made a Companion of the Order of Merit in the Queen’s New Year Honours in 2000 for services to Opera.

He won the Kathleen Ferrier Prize in 1976, and the Royal Overseas League Prize the previous year.

During a long and illustrious career he appeared at many of the world’s leading opera houses including Deutsche Oper Berlin, Staatsoper Berlin, Lyric Opera of Chicago, The Royal Opera, Covent Garden, Glyndebourne Festival, Hamburg Staatsoper, Opera de Paris (Palais Garnier and La Bastille), San Francisco Opera, Opera Australia, Stuttgart Opera, La Fenice, Monte Carlo, Vienna, and Zurich.

Keith Lewis also sang in the greatest concert halls in the world including the Berlin Philharmonie, Carnegie Hall, Concertgebouw, La Scala, Musikverein Vienna, and the Orange & Salzburg Festivals. He regularly collaborated with Maestri Giulini, Solti, Marriner, Mehta, Sinopoli, Dutoit, Gergiev, Gardiner, and Boulez among many others performing a wide range of repertoire.

Well over fifty recordings include the Mozart Requiem (Sony/Giulini and EMI Welser-Möst, Don Giovanni (EMI/Haitink), Messiah (Decca/Solti), Haydn Massess (EMI/Marriner), Beethoven 9 (DG/Giulini), B Minor Mass (Sony/Giulini), Berlioz Requiem (Bertini), Salomé (Sony/Mehta), Mahler 8, Das Lied von der Erde, and Paradies und di Peri (DG/Sinopoli), Damnation de Faust (DG/Chung & Decca/Solti).

In 2014 ‘Clara’s Song’, a piece about the life of Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann, and Johannes Brahms which he devised with the writer Gawn Grainger for himself, Zoë Wanamaker and Melvyn Tan was performed at the Royal Academy of Art, London.

Keith has an extensive lieder repertoire and continues to perform with the pianist Melvyn Tan.



Portrait by Cornel Lucas, 1997

Keith Lewis as Tamino in Robert Wilson’s production of The Magic Flute, Opera de Paris Bastille, 1993