Between the great British singers of the past and those of the present, compiling a list of the 11 best British singers of all time has been a tough ask. See what you think of our choices, and whether you would make any additions.
Greatest British singers
Janet Baker
Now aged 90, Janet Baker is widely respected as singing royalty. Someone who, over the course of her 30 year career, consistently won over audiences with her dramatic intensity. Hers, however, was not a typical start.
Born in Yorkshire to a far from wealthy family, Baker never enjoyed a formal musical education. Her earliest musical experience was watching her father perform in the Police Choir. She left school to work in a bank, transferring to a London branch when she was 20 years old. In her spare time, though, she loved to sing, and after singing a small solo in a performance of Haydn’s Nelson Mass with the Leeds Philharmonic Choir, Ilse Wolf, whom Baker sang alongside, gave her the contact details of a singing teacher in London.
That teacher was Helene Isepp, who played a huge part in ripening Baker’s voice. In 1956, she won second prize in the Kathleen Ferrier competition. That allowed her to pursue her dream of performing on the bigger stage.
She went on to sing all over the world and embrace a huge range of repertoire, although it was with Baroque and early Italian opera and the works of Benjamin Britten that she was most closely associated. She retired in 1989.
Bryn Terfel
Next on our list of best British singers is Bryn Terfel. Born in the Welsh county of Caernarfonshire, the son of a farmer, Bryn Terfel was taught how to sing by a family friend, beginning with traditional Welsh songs.
After moving to London aged 19, he studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. There, he won both the Kathleen Ferrier Memorial Prize and the Gold Medal upon graduation. But his big international breakthrough came in 1992, when he sang Jochanaan in Strauss's Salome at the Salzburg Festival.
Now he is a superstar - unquestionably the most famous living Welsh operatic bass-baritone. His vocal heft has made him a perfect fit for beefy Wagnerian roles such as the Ring Cycle's Wotan. He's also shoneas one of opera's greatest baddies: Scarpia from Puccini's Tosca.
He has embraced a good deal of non-classical music too, not least Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. Terfel and Emma Thompson made a devilish double-act as the killer barber and his pie-baking accomplice.
Felicity Lott
Although she studied violin, piano and singing in her childhood, ‘Flott’, as she is universally known, went on to read French and Latin at Royal Holloway University, with the intention of becoming an interpreter. During her university year abroad in France, she took singing lessons at the conservatory in Grenoble.
That changed everything. On her return to England, Lott applied, and was accepted, into the Royal Academy of Music, where she won the Principal’s Prize.
What followed was a charmed career, in which French works, in particular French song, featured significantly. ‘I started off doing a French degree…Now I get to sing in French all the time,’ the soprano jokily told the Independent 17 years ago.
She is also closely associated with the works of Richard Strauss, German Lieder and the English song repertoire, particularly the songs of Benjamin Britten. For all that she unquestionably ranks as one of the greatest British singers of all time, she has admitted that in another life, she would have liked to be a gardener.
Roderick Williams
Born in north London, in 1965, to a Welsh father and a Jamaican mother, Roderick Williams caught the musical bug early on: a treble from the age of six, he was introduced to the world of opera by his mother, who would sing along to recordings of Maria Callas while cooking Sunday lunch.
It took a while, however, for him to embark on a singing career. Following graduation from Magdalen College, Oxford, Williams initially trained as a teacher. He worked for several years as Director of Choral Studies at Tiffin Boys' School in Kington-upon-Thames, moonlighting as a singer at weekend concerts. It was only after a pivotal conversation about his ambitions with his wife that he decided, aged 28, to apply for the opera course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
With his rich and nuanced voice, his infectious enthusiasm and beaming smile, Roderick Williams is now one of the most sought-after, best singers in the UK. He was also one of the 12 Coronation composers specially commissioned to write music for the Coronation of King Charles.
Emma Kirkby
Growing up in Dorset, the daughter of a Royal Navy Officer, Emma Kirkby did not intend to become a musician. But in the late 1960s, while she was studying Classics at Oxford University, she joined the Schola Cantorum of Oxford, a student choir which, at the time, was being conducted by Andrew Parrott - later to become her first husband.
It was the seed of a career that would see Kirkby soar to the top of the fledgling early music movement, thanks to her vocal purity and dexterity. To date she has made over 100 recordings of music including Italian and English Renaissance madrigals, cantatas and oratorios of the Baroque, works of Mozart, Haydn and Johann Christian Bach. In 2019, she was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Gramophone Classical Music Awards ceremony.
Philip Langridge
Born in Hawkhurst, Kent, the tenor Philip Langridge did not come from a musical family. Through his school’s encouragement, however, he flourished as a violinist and singer - going on to study at the Royal Academy of Music and establish himself as an orchestral violinist.
That particular career path didn’t last long. Joining the chorus at Glyndebourne, Langridge fell in love with the world of opera. And luckily, it loved him back: he went on to excel in all sorts of roles, regularly performing at the BBC Proms, the Edinburgh Festival and opera houses both in Britain and abroad.
Widely considered to be the successor to the tenor Peter Pears, with whom he shared many vocal qualities, he was at his most distinguished performing the works of Benjamin Britten, inviting much praise for his intelligent phrasing, crystal clear diction and subtle sense of artistry. He died in 2010.
Natalya Romaniw
Brought up in Swansea in a single parent family, Natalya Romaniw was a small child when she fell in love with music. That was largely thanks to her Ukrainian grandfather, who would play the accordion and sing to her while her police officer mother was working shifts.
But it wasn't until studying at the Guildhall School of Music that she became familiar with opera. Fast forward a decade, she is one of the most sought-after young British sopranos, much admired for the depth of her voice, but even more so for her depth of character portrayal.
And she's had many opportunities now to display it: the last few years have seen her cast in several psychologically meaty roles, many of which, including Tatiana (in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin), Janáček's Jenůfa and Dvořák's Rusalka, have drawn on Romaniw's Slavic heritage.
Anthony Rolfe Johnson
Despite singing as a boy soprano, Anthony Rolfe Johnson did not initially consider music as a career. Instead, he studied agriculture, becoming a farm manager who would sing hymns to his herd of cows. It was only after joining a choral society in Crawley, West Sussex, where he was encouraged by another member to pursue a professional singing career, that he applied, and was accepted, by the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
He enjoyed a long and varied career, singing a wide range of repertoire at the world’s greatest opera houses. Bach and Britten were his pièces de résistance. Well loved for his mellifluous tenor voice, he died in 2010, of complications from Alzheimer's.
Iestyn Davies
Born in York, the son of a cellist father and history teacher mother, Iestyn Davies sang as a boy treble in the choir of St John's College, Cambridge. It was in his teens, however, that he discovered his countertenor voice, while singing bass in his school choir.
‘I got a bit bored, really. I was singing falsetto quietly in the background and someone next to me said: “That sounds OK; you should take it more seriously,”’ he recalled in an interview with The Guardian. ‘It wasn’t like it came naturally to me, but it was different from what other people were doing, which I liked.’
Graduating from his Cambridge University degree in Archaeology and Anthropology, Davies went on to study at the Royal Academy of Music. He's enjoyed a high-flying career ever since, owing to the silky, sophisticated beauty of his countertenor voice.
Kathleen Ferrier
And rounding off our list of greatest British singers is Kathleen Ferrier. Who knows what this feted contralto might have gone on to achieve, had she not been snuffed out by breast cancer, aged only 41, at the height of her fame.
Ferrier's was an unconventional story. The daughter of a Lancashire village schoolmaster, she showed promise on the piano as a child. Later, she won various amateur piano competitions while working as a telephonist with the General Post Office.
But she did not take up singing seriously until 1937. After winning a singing competition at the Carlisle Festival, she began to receive offers of professional singing engagements. Within ten years, she had become a nationally known singer, followed by a further five years of international fame.
What set her apart from other singers, apart from the distinctive timbre of her contralto voice, was her authenticity: her love and understanding of the music she sang and the unpretentious manner in which she communicated that understanding to others.
Now, more than half a century after her death, her recordings - most notably her iconic rendition of the English folk song ‘Blow the Wind Southerly - serve as a poignant reminder of a great singer with a big heart, snatched away from us far too soon.
