Shaun Brown and Simon Perry

Shaun Brown

Australian baritone Shaun Brown has performed and studied in England, Germany, France, Italy and the US, where he completed a Doctor of Musical Arts at the University of North Texas. He is currently Director of Performance at The University of Queensland School of Music, where he holds the position of Vocal Performance Fellow.

A former Opera Queensland (OQ) Young Artist, Shaun’s engagements with the company span more than three decades: he has appeared in over fifty productions in addition to numerous concerts, festival events, workshops and masterclasses. He is known to Queensland audiences for his many appearances, including roles in Don Giovanni, The Merry Widow, Die Fledermaus, Carmen, The Marriage of Figaro, and the Brisbane and touring productions of La bohème, The Barber of Seville and Ruddigore.

In 2021, Shaun performed “A Poet’s Love”, a recital with Sarah Crane and Alex Raineri as part of OQ’s Studio Series in partnership with Brisbane Music Festival. Most recently, he performed in OQ’s new productions of The Sopranos, La traviata singing Baron Douphol, Cosi fan Tutte singing Don Alfonso and performing in Opera at Jimbour and in Winton and Longreach as part of the 2024 Festival of Outback Opera.

Internationally, Shaun has sung for Opéra de Lyon, New Zealand International Arts Festival, Freiburg Opera, L’Atelier du Rhin, and in New York at the Center for Contemporary Opera in operatic works by Jake Heggie. He has performed to critical acclaim as a concert soloist in repertoire including Britten’s War Requiem, Bach’s St Matthew Passion, Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s Elijah.

Simon Perry

Dr Simon Perry is a lecturer in musicology in the School of Music at the University of Queensland, Australia. His research interests include: theory and analysis of music, with particular focus on repertoires of the late 19th and early 20th century; music theory in Russia in the early 20th century; the music of Percy Grainger. Recent work (including forthcoming material) includes chapters and articles on: work on notational analysis of late common-practice and early post-common practice repertoires; a study of the notion of posthumous collaboration, considering Rimsky-Korsakov’s completion of Musorgsky’s Khovanshchina, and a study of the aesthetics of Percy Grainger as approached through his unpublished autobiographic writing.