Quirijn de Lang

Quirijn de Lang’s exceptional versatility as a singer and actor have led to considerable critical success for him in an unusually wide variety of roles. Whilst his core operatic repertoire probably lies within the works of Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti and Britten, he has spent much of his career exploring roles outside the mainstream. His recent successes include roles as disparate as Christus in a staging of Bach’s St John Passion (Nederlandse Reisopera), Ponchel in the Pulitzer Prize winning new work Silent Night (Wexford), and Fred/Petrucchio in Kiss Me, Kate (Opera North). Quirijn has also given memorable performances in more conventional repertoire such as Guglielmo (Opera North), Schaunard (Opera North and Grange Park), the Count in Figaro (Opera North) , Dandini in La Cenerentola (Garsington) and Malatesta (Nederlandse Reisopera).

Born in Holland, of Dutch and Indonesian descent, Quirijn spent some of his childhood in Japan. After a degree Biology at the University of Amsterdam, Quirijn studied singing at the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and at the Milanese Scuola di Musica, with belcanto ‘guru’ Rodolfo Celletti.

An unexpected jump-in led to Quirijn’s major debut as Papageno at the Nederlandse Reisopera at the age of twenty two, winning the opera guild prize for 'best performance of the season'. Over the next few years he made regular appearances at De Vlaamse Opera in roles such as Marco in Gianni Schicchi and Harlekin in Ariadne, and the title role in Hendrickx’s Achilleus, as well as continuing his relationship with the Nederlandse Reisopera, where he sang, amongst other things, Ottokar in Der Freischütz and the Marchese in La Traviata.

In 2007 Quirijn made his UK debut at Garsington as Harlekin, and shortly afterwards at Scottish Opera as the Count in Il matrimonio segreto. Since then he has become a regular visitor to the UK, building particularly strong relationships with the summer festivals at Grange Park (Der Graf in Capriccio, Yeletsky in The Queen of Spades, Riccardo in I Puritani, Clavaroche in Fortunio, and Schaunard in La Boheme) and Garsington (Dandini in La Cenerentola, Selim in Il Turco in Italia, D’Arlange in Vert-Vert, and with Opera North (Guglielmo, Schaunard, Demetrius, the Count in Figaro, the Flamenco singer in La Vida Breve, and Fred/Petrucchio in Kiss Me, Kate).

He has also continued to appear in the major opera houses of Europe, such as La Monnaie (Le surintendent des plaisirs, Cendrillon), the Netherlands Opera and Deutsche Oper Berlin (Pantalone, L’amour des trois oranges), English National Opera (Pete Dayton in Lost Highway), as well as returning to the Nederlandse Reisopera (Jesus in Johannes Passion).

Quirijn’s skills as an actor, mean that he is equally at home in opera, operetta and music theatre, and his role as Fred/Petrucchio fulfilled a long held ambition to appear in a classic musical, and to perform Shakespeare on a British stage.

He is also an experienced recitalist, specialising in the song repertoire of Schumann, Wolf and Fauré, modern American composers such as Barber and Rorem, and Italian Song of the early 1900s.

Recent projects were Hamlet in Ambroise Thomas' Hamlet, for Opera2Day, currently on Operavision, Sam in Leonard Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti, also featured on Operavision, Danilo/ The Merry Widow, Fred Graham/Kiss Me Kate playing at the Ravenna Festival and London West End, Lt. Audebert/Silent Night, all for Opera North, and Malatesta/Don Pasquale for Welsh National Opera.

Last updated - September 2019