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The American tenor and music teacher, Brian Arreola, is a graduate of St. Olaf College, where he studied voice and cello. While a student at St. Olaf College, He co-founded the professional touring male vocal ensemble, Cantus, described by Fanfare Magazine as “the premier men’s vocal ensemble in the United States.” He spent several years touring the USA, Canada and France with Cantus, as well as serving as its Co-Artistic Director. He is currently completing his Doctorate of Musical Arts in Vocal Performance at Indiana University, where he studies with Andreas Poulimenos and has sung Roméo in Roméo et Juliette, Des Grieux in Manon, Nelson Deadly in Too Many Sopranos, the Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto, and Rodolfo in La Bohème.
Brian Arreola has been an apprentice artist at Des Moines Metro Opera and Opera Theater of St. Louis. He made his professional operatic mainstage debut as Tybalt in The Minnesota Opera’s 2008 production of Charles Gounod's Roméo et Juliette (January-February 2008), and made his European debut in fall 2008, singing Don José in the Ente Concerti production of Le Cabaret de Carmen in Sardinia, Italy. He reprised that role in 2009-2010 season with American Opera Theater in Baltimore. He was featured twice with Opera Carolina in 2009-2010 season, singing El Remendado in Georges Bizet's Carmen (March 2010) and Rodrigo in Otello (May 2010); in 2011 he sang Jacquino in L.v. Beethoven's Fidelio.
Brian Arreola performs regularly with opera companies across the USA. He has been described as a “robust Italian tenor” by the Washington Post, and his singing was called “fiery” by the St. Paul Pioneer Press. In 2013 he created the role of Luis Rodrigo Griffith in Opera Theatre of St. Louis’s world-premiere of Terence Blanchard’s “opera-in-jazz” Champion, receiving accolades from Opera Today, which praised his “well-schooled tenor and his impassioned way with several high-flying phrases,” and Opera News, which said that, “as Luis, the older Griffith's adopted son and caretaker, Brian Arreola was tenderness personified.” He has been featured with The Minnesota Opera, Opera Carolina, American Opera Theater, Opera Theatre of St. Louis and Ente Concerti (Sardinia, Italy), and others. He sang the title role in Songs of the Fisherman and Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly on the 2013 Grachtenfestival (Amsterdam, Netherlands). In 2014, he sang Isamele in Opera Carolina’s Nabucco, as well as the love duet from Madama Butterfly on their season opening gala concert Art Poetry Music. In October 2015, he sang at the same opera house the role of Jaquino in Fidelio; and in January 2016, Tybalt in Roméo et Juliette. In August 2017 he premiered the solo dance-opera, Wake: Lucia, by Leaonard Mark Lewis, and sings the role of Ragueneau in the Opera Carolina production of Cyrano in November 2017.
Brian Arreola has appeared as a soloist with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.
Since 2010, Brian Arreola is Associate Professor of Voice, Opera Workshop and director of the Opera Workshop at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The UNC Charlotte Opera Workshop/Chamber Orchestra production of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi and Suor Angelica, for which he was stage director and conductor, won 3rd prize in the National Opera Association’s 2013 Opera Production Competition. He currently lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. |
