Simon Wallfisch

Simon Wallfisch, born in London during 1982 into a household of musicians, works as a British cellist and baritone who appears regularly in opera and has issued multiple discs alongside pianist Edward Rushton. A committed opponent of anti-Semitism, he champions scores by creators whose livelihoods were wrecked under Nazi rule and serves as trustee of the International Centre for Suppressed Music. His father Raphael plays cello, his mother Elizabeth plays violin, and further relatives across two generations also pursue music. At age five he took up the cello; between 2000 and 2006 he trained on the instrument with Leonid Gorokhov and in voice with Russell Smythe at the Royal College of Music. A subsequent year of study took him to the Hanns Eisler Hochschule für Musik, after which he enrolled from 2007 to 2009 at the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig, working on singing with Jeanette Favaro-Reuter and Wolfram Rieger. He received additional coaching from Raymond Connell and Snezana Brzacovic. Wallfisch belonged to the Zurich Opera House Opera Studio between 2009 and 2011; in 2013 he portrayed Escamillo for the Nederlandse Reisopera production of La tragédie de Carmen. Throughout the following decade he sang with English Touring Opera, Orfeo Inscena and the Nash Ensemble. His first recording, Geoffrey Bush: Songs, appeared in 2014 with Rushton, and the pair went on to complete four further albums between 2015 and 2020, among them Robert Schumann: Songs of Love and Death in 2019 and Johannes Brahms: Songs of Loss and Betrayal in 2020. In 2022 Wallfisch performed Orff’s Carmina Burana at the Berlin Philharmonie; the next year he made first appearances at both the Deutsche Oper Berlin and the Royal Opera House Covent Garden. Songs of Max Kowalski, issued on Nimbus Records in 2023, featured Camille Butcher together with Rushton and Wallfisch.