Claire Booth

Claire Booth distinguishes herself through an approach that unites contemporary opera with classical repertoire across concert stages, audio releases, and screen productions. Leading composers from Britain and farther afield have composed works specifically for her voice. She has appeared with several of the United Kingdom’s foremost orchestras as well as prominent ensembles in France and the United States. In 2024 the album Arnold Schoenberg: Expressionist Music appeared under her name.

Born in Yorkshire during the early 1980s, Booth earned double first-class honors at Oxford University before continuing at the Guildhall School of Music. An early and instinctive pull toward new music prompted distinguished composers to create pieces for her from the start of her career. Oliver Knussen led the way with the intimate Requiem: Songs for Sue, written expressly for her in 2006; subsequent premieres have involved Harrison Birtwistle, George Benjamin, Elliott Carter, and Pierre Boulez. She has simultaneously assembled an extensive body of traditional operatic roles, placing her among the small number of singers equally at home in both spheres. Her credits include Rosina in Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Elcia in Mosè in Egitto, further Rossini parts, and the title character in Janácek’s The Cunning Little Vixen.

Recordings began for her in 2010 with a Naxos disc devoted to Alun Hoddinott and have remained focused on recent music, encompassing Ryan Wigglesworth’s Echo and Narcissus on NMC and Jonathan Dove song cycles on Naxos. A 2017 release presented Percy Grainger’s folk-song settings with Christopher Glynn at the keyboard. Concert engagements have placed her with leading British orchestras—the BBC Symphony, London Philharmonic, and City of Birmingham Symphony among them—as well as international groups such as the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris, the Boston Symphony, and the Chicago Symphony.

Booth has explored fresh territory in filmed vocal performance through extended collaboration with director Netia Jones. One result, captured during the 2015-2016 season, was a multimedia video production of Georg Friedrich Haas’ Atthis, scored for soprano and eight instruments to Sappho’s love poems. The project concluded a season that also included works by Luigi Rossi, Ryan Wigglesworth, Oliver Knussen, Rossini, and Ravel, a range few contemporary singers match. In the 2019-2020 season she sang in Handel’s Berenice at the Royal Opera House, the company’s first staging of the opera since its 1737 Covent Garden premiere.

Further recordings for Avie have paired her again with Glynn on Edvard Grieg: Lyric Music in 2019 and Modest Mussorgsky: Unorthodox Music in 2021. She returned in 2024 on Orchid Classics, once more accompanied by Glynn, with the album Arnold Schoenberg: Expressionist Music. Booth directs the Contemporary Performance course at the Britten Pears School in Aldeburgh and appears with growing frequency as a presenter and contributor on BBC Radio 3’s Inside Music and Record Review.