Performance Database

Polish bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny first studied acting at the Film, Television and Theater Academy in his hometown of Łódź. He made his debut in a film directed by Oscar-winning director Andrzej Wajda and then worked as an actor/director in numerous television, film and theater productions in Poland.  Around the same time, he began his vocal studies at the Fryderyk Chopin Academy in Warsaw, which he continued at the Hochschule für Musik in Dresden.

Tomasz Konieczny experienced his international breakthrough at the Vienna State Opera, where he performed numerous roles of his repertoire with great success. To this day, he feels a special bond with the Haus am Ring. In addition, Tomasz Konieczny regularly appears at the most important international opera houses such as the MET, La Scala, the Bavarian State Opera, the Opéra Bastille, the Zurich Opera House, the Teatro Real Madrid, the Semperoper Dresden and many others, as well as at the Bayreuth and Salzburg Festivals.

Most recently, he has appeared as Wotan/Wanderer in the new Zurich Ring as well as at the Bayreuth Festival, as Holländer at the Met or as Cardillac in Vienna, among others. The most important projects of the current season 2023/24 are Holländer at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Wotan (Walküre) in Leipzig, Wotan/Wanderer at the Berlin State Opera and again in Zurich and Bayreuth.

In addition to Wotan/Wanderer in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, his repertoire includes roles such as Amfortas in Parsifal, Kurwenal in Tristan und Isolde, the title roles in Der fliegende Holländer, Berg’s Wozzeck and in Cardillac by Hindemith, Scarpia in Puccini’s Tosca, Jack Rance in La Fanciulla del West, the Four Villains in The Tales of Hoffmann, Mandryka in Arabella, Barak in Die Frau ohne Schatten and Jochanaan in Salome, Pizarro in Beethoven’s Fidelio and many more.

Tomasz Konieczny is also a highly successful concert performer. His repertoire includes Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, the Christmas Oratorio, Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s Elijah, the Requiems of Mozart, Verdi and Dvorak, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, Dvorak’s Stabat Mater, Penderecki’s Kosmogonia, Lukaspassion, Seven Gates of Jerusalem and the Messa da Requiem by Maciejewski. He has presented his recital programs of songs by Strauss, Rachmaninov, Twardowski, Penderecki, Beethoven, Moniuszko, Schubert, Mahler, Mussorgsky and other major composers with great success in Dresden, Warsaw, Munich, Vienna and Tokyo. He collaborates with renowned conductors such as Adam Fischer, Sir Andrew Davis, Gianandrea Noseda, Yannick Nézét-Seguin and Franz Welser-Möst, to name but a few.

Konieczny has made numerous critically acclaimed CD and DVD recordings, including three different recordings of the Ring cycle conducted by Marek Janowski, Christian Thielemann and Sir Simon Rattle. His discography also includes two recordings of Schubert’s Winterreise, one in the original and one with a completely new and different Polish text. Most recently, his Lied CD From Secession to Distortion was released, featuring songs by Richard Strauss, Aleksander Nowak and Henryk Czyz.

Since 2017 Tomasz Konieczny also holds the Austrian citizenship. In 2019, he was appointed the title of Austrian Kammersänger on the stage of the Vienna State Opera. In his native Poland, he received the country’s highest cultural award, the Gloria Artis Medal for Cultural Merit in Gold (2022).