Nicholas Clapton - Life and Career

Life and Career

Clapton was born in Worcester, England and read music at Magdalen College, Oxford. He studied singing with David Mason and is now a pupil of Diane Forlano. He made his professional debut at the Wigmore Hall in 1984. In the following year, he was a double prize-winner at the Concurso "Francisco Viñas" in Barcelona, and in 1987 he won the English Song Award.

Clapton is particularly known for countertenor roles in contemporary opera, the heroic castrato repertoire of the eighteenth century, and romantic art song (in partnership with the pianist Jennifer Partridge). He has performed in major opera houses and concert halls around the world, and has given twenty-nine world premières (including six operas).

Unusual events in his career have included: a Purcell concert in that composer's tercentenary year in a former Palace of Culture in Siberia; playing three different reincarnations of the great castrato Farinelli; and accompanying himself on the castanets in Simon Holt's Six Caprices. In concert and oratorio, as well as major works by Bach and Handel, Clapton's repertoire includes Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder, Elgar's Sea Pictures, Vaughan Williams' Five Mystical Songs and the Verdi Requiem.

Having taught for several years at Trinity College of Music in London, Nicholas Clapton is now a professor of Singing at the Royal Academy of Music. He gives regular master-classes at the Dartington International Summer School, and is a Visiting Professor at the Zeneakadémia in Budapest. He has also taught in Prague, Belgrade and the Netherlands. His 2004 biography of Alessandro Moreschi was chosen by the Tablet magazine as one of its Books of the Year for 2005; (it was re-issued in a larger second edition as Moreschi and the Voice of the Castrato in 2008). In June 2005 Clapton became a Doctor of Liberal Arts of the Liszt Ferenc Music University. In 2006 he presented the documentary Castrato for BBC Four television, and curated the exhibition Handel and the Castrati at the Handel House Museum, London. His second book, Budapest, City of Music, was published in March 2009.