Clare Wilkinson

Clare Wilkinson, an English mezzo-soprano, grew up amid music in a Manchester household headed by conductor Stephen Wilkinson. At seventeen she made her first appearance with Musica Antiqua of London after viol player Alison Crum extended the invitation. She read at Trinity College, Cambridge, then continued with postgraduate vocal training at Trinity College of Music in London under Hazel Wood. In 2004 she began an association with John Eliot Gardiner that led to performances of Bach, Handel, and Purcell choral music alongside the English Baroque Soloists. Additional engagements have taken her to the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the English Concert, Les Talens Lyriques, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the Netherlands Bach Society, the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, the Parley of Instruments, the New London Consort, the Dunedin Consort, the Gürzenich-Orchester Köln, and the Hanover Band, together with numerous further groups. She has also appeared with the viol consorts Fretwork and the Rose Consort of Viols. On the operatic stage she has been heard in works by Monteverdi, Purcell, and Handel; as a member of I Fagiolini she took part in John La Bouchardière’s The Full Monteverdi, drawn from Monteverdi madrigals, as well as Henk Schut’s Tallis in Wonderland. Her recordings appear on the Signum Classics, Channel Classics, Delphian, Deux-Elles, and Cypres labels.