Nicholas Clapton

Counter-tenor

Nicholas Clapton was born in Worcester and read Music at Magdalen College, Oxford. He made his professional debut at the Wigmore Hall in 1984, since when he has pursued a wide-ranging career in opera, oratorio and recital throughout Britain and Europe, in the Far East and in the USA. While particularly well-known for his performance of contemporary music (he has given more than twenty world premières), he is also equally at home in the heroic castrato repertoire of the eighteenth century, having played the great Farinelli on stage on several occasions. In recital he has been privileged to work with Jennifer Partridge for some two decades.

Also greatly in demand as a teacher, Nicholas Clapton is a professor of Singing at the Royal Academy of Music and gives regular master-classes at the Dartington International Summer School. His biography of Moreschi, The Last Castrato, was published in November 2004 and in June 2005 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Liberal Arts summa cum laude by the Liszt Ferenc Music University, Budapest.

In 2006 he presented the documentary Castrato for BBC4 television, and curated the hugely successful exhibition Handel and the Castrati at the Handel House Museum, London. (His research into the castrati has led to him writing for publications as various as the Daily Express, Country Life and Fortean Times.) He also appeared with James Bowman in a series of concerts commemorating the great 'early music' pioneer, David Munrow, and visited Cairo to teach at the Conservatoire, and to sing at the American University, where he gave his fourth world premiere of the year: Ashraf Fouad's song-cycle Monte Bre.

In 2007 he returned to the Budapest Zeneakadémia, where he is now a Visiting Professor, to give two series of master-classes, and travelled to Florence to give two concerts at the Pitti Palace. In July he premiered Cecilia's Angel by Elis Pehkonen, and in December performed Schubert's Winterreise, celebrating twenty years of recitals with Jennifer Partridge. This year he was a contributor to the new exhibition, Handel and the Divas, at Handel House Museum, and to the Cambridge Handel Encyclopedia (to be published in 2009). In June, he will perform premieres of works by Jim Aitchison (in the studio of sculptor Antony Gormley) and Raewyn Bailey (at the Chester Festival). Two recordings of contemporary and medieval music are scheduled for September, including first recordings and commissioned works written specially for him. In October, a new and greatly-enlarged edition of Moreschi, the Angel of Rome will be published alongside his second book, Budapest, City of Music.