Andrew Parrott

A pioneer within Britain’s early music revival, Andrew Parrott has simultaneously devoted attention to twentieth-century and present-day repertoire. More than sixty recordings document his work with the Taverner Choir, Consort, and Players.

Born March 10, 1947, in Walsall in England’s West Midlands, Parrott first cultivated his parallel engagement with historical and modern music while a student at Oxford University. There he explored performance conventions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries together with the scholarly methods used to recover them, all the while serving as assistant to composer Michael Tippett.

Tippett, himself drawn to Renaissance music, proposed that Parrott create a new choir oriented toward that repertory for the 1973 Bath Festival, with which Tippett was affiliated. Parrott accepted, and the ensemble continued as a permanent organization, later expanding to include instrumental forces under the same umbrella. In 1982 he directed a set of Bach cantatas for Hyperion; small-scale performances of Bach, occasionally with one voice to a part, have remained his customary approach.

He has also led other period ensembles, among them England’s Musica Reservata during the 1970s. From 2001 to 2010 he served as music director of the New York Collegium and has appeared with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Conventional orchestras have likewise engaged him, including the Slovak Philharmonic and the Residentie Orchestra of The Hague. He held the post of artistic director with Kent Opera and has conducted at La Scala, the Royal Swedish Opera at Drottningholm, and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

His programming of recent music spans a wide range, embracing works by Luigi Nono, Edgar Varèse, and John Tavener, and he has presided over several premieres, among them Judith Weir’s A Night at the Chinese Opera, which he later recorded for NMC. Research underpins his interpretations and has appeared in book form as The Essential Bach Choir (2000) and The Pursuit of Musick (2023). In 2023 he led the Munich Radio Orchestra in a recording of Mozart’s Die verstellte Gärtnerin—the German version of La finta giardiniera, K. 196—issued by CPO. His catalog then exceeded eighty albums on Virgin Classics, BIS, Sony Classical, and other labels.