Charles Daniels, tenor (London)

Charles Daniels was born in Salisbury. He was a Chorister and Choral Scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, and studied at the Royal College of Music in London under Edward Brooks.

He has made over ninety recordings as a soloist including Handel’s Messiah with the Gabrieli Consort for Deutsche Grammophon, Dowland songs for EMI, Wojciech Kilar’s Missa Pro Pace with the Warsaw Philharmonic for CD Accord, Monteverdi Vespers with The Gabrieli Consort and The King’s Consort, Bach Mass in B Minor with Jos van Veldhoven and De Nederlandse Bach Vereniging, Tenorlied by Senfl with Fretwork , two recital discs, one based on ‘Orfeo’, for ATMA, Rubbra’s Amoretti with the Maggini Quartet, The Beggar’s Opera for Hyperion, and much Purcell and Bach.

Concert appearances have taken him all over the world including regular appearances at the BBC Promenade Concerts, the world première of ‘Songs of the Sky’,a recent song cycle by John Tavener with the oboist Nicholas Daniel and pianist Julius Drake, a fifteen concert tour of Bach’s Mass in B Minor with the Netherlands Bach Society, Handel’s Joshua (London Handel Festival, broadcast by BBC Radio 3), the first performance of G P Colonna’s ‘La Caduta di Gierusalemme’ for 300 years with Manfred Cordes and Weserrenaissance; many performances of the Evangelist in Bach’s St. John and St Matthew Passion; Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius (Warsaw, Winchester, Leicester), Luigi Nono’s Canti di Vita e Amore (Edinburgh Festival), Handel Solomon (Halle and Göttingen Händel-Festspielen); Britten’s Serenade for Tenor Horn and Strings (St.Gallen); Britten War Requiem (Salisbury, Canterbury), Finzi’s Dies Natalis (Brinkburn Festival), Handel’s Messiah (Vienna with Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Brussels, Oslo, Madrid, London (Westminster Abbey, Barbican), Elgar’s The Light of Life (TROS, Netherlands), ; Handel’s Esther in Hebrew in New York, Purcell’s King Arthur in Toronto with Tafelmusik and the Première of Wojciech Kilar’s Missa Pro Pace with the Warsaw Philharmonic, in Warsaw and in Rome for the late Pope John Paul II . He has also been much broadcast on BBC Radio 3, singing music from Perotin to Vaughan Williams.

He was in 2007 in the title rôle in staged performances of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo in Montreal. His completion of Purcell’s unfinished Ode Arise my Muse was broadcast on Radio Canada in the 2009 Montreal Baroque Festival and has recently reconstructed the missing parts of Gesualdo’s six-voice Sacrae Cantiones. Current plans feature much Bach and Monteverdi: the Bach including recording the St Matthew Passion and a concert tour of Bach cantatas and motets using full-size church organs from his time as continuo instruments. The Monteverdi, besides several Vespers concerts, includes recording L’Orfeo with Andrew Parrott; future concerts also range from lute song recitals in Toronto with the lutenist David Miller to a performance of Elgar’s Gerontius in Cardiff.