“He doesn’t reach for high notes. He brings the high notes.”
That’s what an enthusiastic fan, who, after a concert in Florida preserved on YouTube, wants the Metropolitan Opera in New York City to know about rising lyric tenor, Brendan Boyle.
Boyle will be bringing those high notes back to Toledo on Friday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. when makes his role debut as Egyptian warrior Radames in Giuseppe Verdi’s great grand opera Aida.
Toledo Opera audiences have come to know Boyle since the 2022-2023 season during his tenure at the Toledo Opera Association as one of five resident artists. He’s been back pretty regularly, as Father in the Broadway musical Ragtime in 2024; and Mario Cavaradossi in Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, also in 2024, and Don Jose in Georges Bizet’s Carmen in 2025, both role debuts for the tenor from Topeka, Kan., who, while doing his chores on the family farm, practiced singing in front of the livestock.
When he arrived in Toledo for his residency, he had completed his schooling, with an undergraduate degree from Washburn University and a master’s from Baylor and had transitioned from a baritone to a tenor.
Despite some solid grounding in his nascent career, Boyle said Toledo was transformative.
“Everything started in Toledo,” he said.
Growing up Mozart
Boyle said his household was a musical one. “Everything we listened to was predominantly Irish folk music,” he said, adding that he played the guitar while his sister played fiddle.
That changed when his mother, who homeschooled the five children, brought home a CD of Mozart arias.
He said that introduction to classical music affected him and his sister; he began to sing baritone and she sang tenor. In fact, he said, she also wanted to perform but found it too stressful.
He didn’t, and he still finds it exhilarating, not terrifying, when he steps in front of a live audience. He continued as a baritone up through his master’s, he said, singing the title role of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi.
“I made the switch after that,” he said in an earlier interview, “and it’s been great.”
Word spreading
And so far it has been.
Many reviews have cited those skills as well as his vocal abilities, and the word is getting around.
Renowned director Linda Brovsky, who is working on Aida in Toledo, said in an earlier interview that she is looking forward to working with Boyle.
“I haven’t worked with him,” she said. “But I know my agent, when I was asking him, he said, ‘Oh, my God. You’re gonna love him. ‘He’s a great actor.’”
Lisa Marie Rogali is noted for her interpretation of Carmen, and in Toledo and later in Florida, found that Boyle was more than up to the task of the obsessed Don Jose.
“He’s a great colleague and a fun scene partner, which is honestly the best thing you can ask for, especially for a show like Carmen,” she wrote by email. “His voice is really exciting and has that heroic sound that’s perfect for Jose.”
Two months later, Rogali and Boyle were paired again as the fiery Roma woman and the soldier who would eventually kill her in the Gulfshore Opera production in Estero, Fla.
“When we sang Carmen together in Florida, we were able to build on the dynamic we’d already created and discover new things on stage. I loved getting to hear how he had grown and embodied the role the second time around,” she wrote.
A New York City blog, Parterre Box, raved that Boyle’s voice expressed “the character’s descent and loss of control.”
In the recent Orlando Opera production of Silent Night, a Pulitzer Prize winning modern opera based on the film Joyeux Noel about a Christmas Eve truce in the trenches of World War I, Boyle again received acclaim for his “commanding stage presence and combination of a rich, heroic tenor sound suited for the dramatic and emotional weight of the character Nicholas Sprink,” a reluctant soldier.
Wichita Grand Opera conductor and general artistic director Whitney Reader didn’t need to read a review to become impressed with the tenor. He knew him in Topeka, and he claims the honor that he was among the first people to discover him.
“I’m really proud of that,” Reader said.
Reader doesn’t claim to be Boyle’s mentor, but he did coach him as well as work with him as a conductor.
“I was immediately impressed with the quality of his voice,” Reader said. “It’s a world- class instrument that he has. I’m absolutely sure he’s going to have a world career, and he should.”
Toledo experiences
When Boyle says everything for him started in Toledo, he means that. He had become a tenor not long before he accepted his 2022 residency. In an earlier interview, Boyle said he made the right decision to switch, despite the high notes proving elusive at first.
As we know by now, that’s no longer a worry.
During his year as a resident artist, Boyle traveled through the school districts with Opera on Wheels as the resident artists performed a much-altered Pirates of Penzance by William S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. Boyle sang the pirate apprentice Frederick.
But he also did a lot more, performing in recitals around town and getting the much-needed onstage experience.
“The most progression I ever had in any one year was that year in residency at Toledo,” he said, “like getting on the stages, having to sing consistently all the time, like actually doing it as a full-time job.”
But, he added, he learned so much more that hitting high notes.
“Jim [former general director James M. Norman] and Kevin [Bylsma] were very open about the day to day running of the company,” Boyle recalled. “When I had questions about like the programming of a show, or auditions, who they heard, they were always happy to talk about it. Some people are super secretive about that stuff.
“But I also learned from Kevin what was expected as a performer.”
Boyle also covered the role of Turridu in Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana for tenor Brian Cheney and sang a small role in The Merry Widow.
At the end of the season, the TOA performed Celebrazione del Coro, at which Boyle had a treat for the audience.
The tenor sang “Nessun Dorma,” the aria from Puccini’s Turandot on which tenors bank their careers on, with the climactic “vincero” ringing out across the Valentine Theatre with enthusiastic applause echoing afterward.
Boyle closed out his residency, but not his Toledo visits.
It was Norman who invited him to come back to Toledo to debut roles, he said.
“This was Jim’s idea,” he said. “I think it was on the last day in Toledo of my residency, I had a conversation with Jim and he was like, ‘you know, I’d love you to have the opportunity to debut roles here. We’d love to have you back.’”
He and his family, his wife, singer and musician Cheryl Boyle, and three children, Clare, now 6; Benedict, turning 3, and Lucy, who just turned 1, will travel with him, but they also lived with him in Toledo the year of his residency. In fact, Benedict will have his second of three birthdays here.
He said he enjoys the area’s fall season — he and his family live in Austin. There’s something else special here, he said, which his why he didn’t hesitate to agree to come back time and again, especially for his debuts.
“You couldn’t ask for a better situation [to sing in a house] like Toledo, he said. “With people you know, people you’re comfortable with, people who trust you, to try a new rollout, to really get it under your belt for the first time, before maybe — and hopefully — going on to the bigger houses.”
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