Tenor Mark Padmore developed his voice through participation in Renaissance- and Baroque-focused choirs, later concentrating his solo work on Baroque opera and choral repertoire. At the same time his interests reach ahead to Britten, Vaughan Williams, and present-day choral writing, establishing him among Britain’s most reliably admired vocalists.
London-born on March 8, 1961, Padmore was raised in Canterbury. Although he studied clarinet and piano in his youth, he seized the chance to join the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, as a Choral Scholar, an affiliation that secured his admission to the university itself. He completed his degree in 1982 and promptly began building a professional singing career. During the 1980s he appeared with the leading Renaissance ensembles of the period—The Tallis Scholars, The Sixteen, and The Hilliard Ensemble—before making his first solo recording in 1999 on the Chandos release J.S. Bach: Lutheran Masses, Vol. 1.
Additional collaborations have included the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Monteverdi Choir, and the viol consort Fretwork. In choral music he is especially recognized for Bach’s large-scale works, among them performances led by Sir Simon Rattle with the Berlin Philharmonic. On the operatic stage he has appeared at major British houses, singing in Handel’s Jephtha at English National Opera, Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito under René Jacobs for Harmonia Mundi, and Harrison Birtwistle’s The Corridor at the Aldeburgh Festival. A BBC television production of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw cast him as Peter Quint; the resulting DVD received a Gramophone Award for best operatic recording. As a recitalist he has repeatedly programmed Britten, whose writing for the vocally comparable Peter Pears suits his own instrument.
Padmore returns frequently to London’s Wigmore Hall, where he has presented demanding contemporary scores by Birtwistle, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Sally Beamish, and Huw Watkins. His recorded output is both extensive and varied. A second volume of Bach’s Lutheran masses appeared on Chandos in 2000, beginning a lasting relationship with the label. His Harmonia Mundi debut arrived in 2007 with the Handel recital As Steals the Morn, after which he recorded widely for the company. In 2018 he released Schubert’s Winterreise on Harmonia Mundi with fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout. Solo discs of the 2020s include a 2023 pairing of Schubert’s Schwanengesang, D. 957, and Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, Op. 98. Continued invitations to operatic and choral projects have expanded his discography beyond two hundred entries by the mid-2020s.
