John Brancy’s intense musicality and communicative power place him in the front ranks of baritones of his generation.  Hailed by the New York Times as “a vibrant, resonant presence,” Brancy won First Prize in the Art Song Division of the 2018 Concours Musical International de Montreal, a win that recognizes him as a premiere interpreter of Art Song repertoire in our time.  The New Jersey native also won First Prize in the 2018 Lotte Lenya Competition in New York, Second Prize at the 2017 Wigmore Hall Competition in London and prior to that won the media prize in the 2017 Belvedere International Singing Competition in Moscow and first prize in the Jensen Foundation Vocal Competition in 2015. He is also a past winner of the Marilyn Horne Song Competition and the Sullivan Foundation Grand Prize.

This 2018/19  Brancy performs an eclectic season of new music, including his memorial in song recital tour and several key debuts in concert and opera. Brancy makes a return to Oper Frankfurt for a new production of Olga Neuwirth’s Lost Highway directed by MacArthur Genius grant recipient Yuval Sharon, conducted by Karsten Januschke. Brancy will then embark on a national tour of his critically acclaimed programs A Silent Night: A WWI Memorial in Songand Armistice: The Journey Home with internationally renowned pianist and collaborator Peter Dugan. This tour takes Brancy to locations such as Stanford University, West Point Academy, the Smithsonian Institute, the US Naval Academy and the Kennedy Center to name a few. Brancy then goes on to sing a tour of Handel’s Messiah with performances in Victoria Symphony in Canada, the Johnstown Symphony and a return to Carnegie Hall’s Isaac Stern stage under the baton of Kent Tritle with Musica Sacraa. Brancy then makes his way to Lisbon, Portugal for a semi-staged production of Romeo et Juliet where he performs the role of Mercutio with the Gulbenkian Orchestra and Chor conducted by star ascendant conductor Lorenzo Viotti. Additionally, Brancy will collaborate again with director Yuval Sharon as a featured performer on a new production of Meredith Monk’s ATLAS, this will mark Brancy’s debut with the LA Philharmonic.

Of special interest is Brancy’s recently released CD, A Silent Night: A WWI Memorial in Song, with Peter Dugan. Their work together has presented them with debuts at Alice Tully Hall as part of the Juilliard Alumni Recital Series, Carnegie Hall as part of the Weill Recital Series and Vocal Arts DC at the Kennedy Center. As well, they have won numerous awarded and critical acclaim for their work together as a duo. In the previous season, on the opera stage, Brancy appeared as Albert in Stadttheater Klagenfurt’s production of Werther conducted by Lorenzo Viotti and followed with a reprise of Malatesta in Don Pasquale, this time for Landestheater Vorarlberg in Bregenz. For Saint Thomas Church in New York, he was heard in Brahms’s Requiem. Finally, he was a featured soloist at the Carmel Bach Festival debuting such masterworks as Bach’s St Matthew’s Passionand Orff’s Carmina Burana. 

During the 2016-2017 season, he made important debuts at Florida Grand Opera singing the title role in Eugene Onegin, Clarion Music Society as Papageno in Die Zauberflöte, for Opera Omaha as the Steward in Dove’s FLIGHT, and Opera National de Lorraine as Harlekin in Ariadne auf Naxos. Other highlights have included his debut with the Glyndebourne Festival Opera Tour as Malatesta in Don Pasquale, his Opera Theatre of Saint Louis debut as Harlekin in Ariadne auf Naxos, Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Pacific Opera Victoria and Dancaire/Morales in Carmen for Oper Frankfurt.

Brancy has been engaged by Semperoper Dresden, Edmonton Opera, Paris’s Théâtre du Chatelet, Opera Saratoga, and Opera San Antonio in works ranging from Tobias Picker’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox to Dandini in La Cenerentola to John Adams’s I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky.  Recital credits include the Hugo Wolf Akademie, Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, The Kennedy Center, the New York Festival of Song with pianist Steven Blier, the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago, and Société d’art vocal de Montréal in collaboration with pianist Peter Dugan. He has also appeared with the San Francisco Symphony, Boston Symphony, Kansas City Symphony, and the Edmonton Symphony. Brancy holds a graduate degree from the Juilliard School in New York.