Martyn Hill

Martyn Hill ranks among Britain's foremost tenors, equally at home on the operatic stage, the recital platform, and the concert podium. Major houses around the world have welcomed him, and his repertory spans the standard canon, historically informed practice, and the most demanding contemporary idioms.

Performances of Benjamin Britten's tenor music have formed a central thread of his career. He has delivered the War Requiem with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra under Edo de Waart and with the Los Angeles Philharmonic led by André Previn, and the Spring Symphony with the Hallé Orchestra conducted by Kent Nagano. Les illuminations and the Serenade also number among the works he has both sung and recorded.

On Michael Tippett's ninetieth birthday he presented the composer's complete song cycles in Tippett's presence and later committed them to disc for Hyperion. In 1995 he traversed Schubert's three great cycles—Die schöne Müllerin, Winterreise, and Schwanengesang—across three successive evenings at St. John's Smith Square in London. Staged versions of Winterreise have also featured in his schedule, as has Hans Zender's orchestral reworking of the cycle, which he performed in Frankfurt with Ensemble Modern.

Early and modern opera account for most of his notable stage appearances. He has sung Eumetes in Il ritorno di Ulisse in Patria in Innsbruck, Tokyo, Athens, Florence, and Cremona, and Admète in Alceste in Montpellier. The title role of Britten's Peter Grimes, Red Whiskers in Billy Budd, and Peter Quint in The Turn of the Screw have all been part of his Britten operatic work. In Boston he portrayed Tom Rakewell in Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress; at the Royal Festival Hall he appeared as Oedipus Rex in the same composer's opera-oratorio. Additional roles include Mozart in Rimsky-Korsakov's Mozart and Salieri and Achilles in Tippett's King Priam. He created the central character in Sandeep Bhagwati's Ramanujan at the Munich Biennale.

Concert engagements have encompassed Schoenberg's Von heute auf morgen with Boulez and the Ensemble InterContemporain, Lutosławski's Paroles tissées, Nono's Il canto sospeso, Holliger's Erde und Himmel, and the world premiere of Elliott Carter's In Sleep, in Thunder. His recordings appear on the EMI, Hyperion, Chandos, Harmonia Mundi, Erato, Vanguard, and Virgin Classics labels.