Nigel Rogers

Who is Nigel Rogers?

Nigel David Rogers is an English tenor, music conductor, singing teacher and vocal coach, who has sung in over seventy classical music album recordings in German, French, Italian, Latin and English, mostly of early music, baroque and sacred music, including works by Claudio Monteverdi, Handel, Purcell, and Bach. Singing critics like Melanie Eskenazi describe him as a vocal virtuoso of the local phrasing and decoration of those particular musical periods exactly as they were practised back then. He is considered a world authority in the field of European early music, the scores of which he helped promote and rescue as a music genre, since the outset of his early career.

A native of Wellington, Shropshire, Nigel Rogers studied at King's College, Cambridge from 1953 to 1956, in Rome in 1957, in Milan from 1958 to 1959, and with Gerhard Hüsch at the Munich Hochschule für Musik. He made his operatic debut in Amsterdam, and has sung in many renowned international opera houses. He has given numerous singing master classes and workshops at music conservatories worldwide.

Operas with which he was notably associated include L'Orfeo by Monteverdi, in which he took the title role and made recordings. From 1978 until his retirement he was a professor of classical singing and operatic voice coach at the Royal College of Music in London. In 1979 he founded and thereupon conducted the vocal ensemble Chiaroscuro for the performance of Italian baroque compositions.