Critical acclaim of Ryan’s performances, interviews & press features
“Singing is most powerful to me when it’s deeply connected to our whole lives,” says Ryan McKinny. These are telling words from a singer who has forged his career not as a series of stops on the opera circuit but as a process of exploration—and whose reputation stands as much on his thoughtful approach to his work as on the intrinsic appeal of his...
The glowing menace of the mushroom cloud mixed genius with death. John Adams’ “Doctor Atomic” shows the father of nuclear weapons in all his complexity; the charismatic leader, the cold calculation and the horror at what his work had wrought. The dramatic piece opens for the first time in the state of the bomb’s gestation and birth at the Santa Fe Opera on...
“Ryan McKinny spielt ihn in der Wiesbadener Neuinszenierung nicht als ungehobelten Rumpelmacho aus dem exotischen Slawonien, sondern als eleganten Träumer, dem man den wilden Ruf nach scharf geschliffenen Säbeln nicht recht abnehmen mag. Auch seinen bassgetönten Bariton setzt er sehr zurückhaltend ein.” Laufenberg
“The center of it all is baritone Ryan McKinny’s Celebrant. Rather than a naive, young, folk-singing cleric who struggles with the demands of institutionalized religion and the contemporary world, McKinny proved a more mature, more authentically troubling cross between Moses, the cult leader Jim Jones and 1960s countercultural spiritualist Alan Watts. In...
When Leonard Bernstein’s Mass had its world premiere in 1971, the world was, to put in bluntly, a mess. The war in Southeast Asia was still going strong, political assassinations had shocked the world, popular culture was shifting radically and civil rights were becoming more and more important. In other words, it was a time not unlike our own. Critics didn’t...
“The opera opens with Clarence, a hearty miner (the exuberant bass-baritone Ryan McKinny), who sets up the story almost as if giving a lecture. “It was a driving, vigorous, restless population,” Mr. McKinny sings lustily over skittish, pointillist music in the orchestra. “Not dainty, simpering kid-gloved weaklings, but muscular, stalwart, dauntless young...
