Carolyn Sampson

Carolyn Sampson earned recognition from Gramophone magazine editors as the foremost British early music soprano by a considerable margin. While frequently interpreting and committing to disc the works of Handel, she has contributed to conductor Masaaki Suzuki’s comprehensive series of Bach cantatas and has documented repertoire extending well beyond the Baroque period.

Born May 18, 1974, in Bedford, England, Sampson pursued vocal studies at the University of Birmingham under Richard Smart and performed with the Ex Cathedra choir. Her first staged role came in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea at the English National Opera, where she later took part in numerous additional productions; she has also sung at the Paris Opera, though her principal activity remains concert appearances alongside prominent early music groups such as The King’s Consort, Collegium Vocale, and the Freiburger Barockorchester. She has furthermore collaborated with leading symphony orchestras including the NDR Radiophilharmonie and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin. Her first solo recordings appeared in 2004 on the Hyperion label—although her discography reaches back to the 1990s—comprising one album of love songs drawn from Rameau’s operas and another devoted to Handel’s Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, HWV 76.

In 2005 she recorded the recently unearthed Bach cantata Alles mit Gott und nichts ohn’ Ihn, BWV 1127, alongside Suzuki during his complete Bach cantata project and featured on multiple volumes of that series. Her 2007 performance in the Boston Early Music Festival production of Lully’s Psyché was captured on disc and received a Grammy nomination. During the 2010s she continued to record for BIS, the label issuing the Suzuki cycle, as well as for Vivat, Harmonia Mundi, and additional companies. Although her core focus has remained Baroque repertoire, she has also documented works by Charles Villiers Stanford, Hubert Parry, and Francis Poulenc, among later composers. In total she has participated in more than 100 albums, among them a 2021 BIS release of Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne.