Heppner, Ben

Heppner Ben, outstanding Canadian tenor; b. Murrayville, British Columbia, Jan. 14, 1956. He studied at the Univ. of British Columbia and the Univ. of Toronto. In 1979 he took 1^st prize in the CBC Talent Festival, and then sang in concert and oratorio settings in Canada. In 1987 he appeared as Strauss’s Bacchus at the Victoria State Opera in Sydney. He made his European operatic debut as Lohengrin at the Royal Opera in Stockholm in 1988. That same year, he won the Metropolitan Opera Auditions and the Birgit Nilsson Prize, which led to his U.S. debut at a state concert for the King and Queen of Sweden at N.Y.’s Carnegie Hall. Following an engagement as Lohengrin at the San Francisco Opera in 1989, he sang Bacchus at the Vienna State Opera and Walther von Stolzing at Milan’s La Scala and London’s Covent Garden in 1990. He made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in N.Y. on Dec. 11, 1991, as Idomeneo. In 1992 he sang Dvorak’s Dimitrij in Munich and Mozart’s Tito in Salzburg, and also created the title role in Bolcom’s McTeague in Chicago. In 1994 he was engaged as Lohengrin at the Seattle Opera. He appeared as Peter Grimes in Vancouver and as Tchaikovsky’s Hermann at the Metropolitan Opera in 1995. After singing Andrea Chénier in Seattle in 1996, he appeared as Calaf in Chicago in 1997. In 1998 he returned to Seattle as Tristan and to the Metropolitan Opera as Lohengrin and Walther von Stolzing. He made his N.Y. recital debut at Carnegie Hall on Jan. 30, 1999. Hepp-ner’s engagements as a soloist with orchs. and as a recitalist have taken him to the world’s leading music centers.

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire