Mary Bevan

Mary Bevan ranks among the most adaptable performers active in British opera, with a range extending from Monteverdi to recent world premieres. Comic works hold special appeal for her, resulting in multiple engagements with operettas by Gilbert & Sullivan.

Born in 1985 in Hertford in southeast England, she grew up in a musical household where her siblings Sophie Bevan and Benjamin Bevan both became established vocal soloists and their father David Bevan worked as a conductor. At Trinity College, Cambridge, she concentrated on Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic literature while also taking singing classes; she later continued her vocal training at the Royal Academy of Music under Lillian Watson and Audrey Hyland. Her operatic credits include appearances at Covent Garden, the English National Opera, and the Opera de Monte Carlo. She received the Royal Philharmonic Society's Young Artist Award. Among the roles she has sung are Arpago in Vivaldi’s L'Incoronazione di Dario at Garsington Opera in England, Pamina at the Palestinian Mozart Festival and Papagena at British Youth Opera in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and Rebecca in the 2011 world premiere of Nico Muhly's Two Boys. She has also played Yum-Yum in Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado, an assignment unusual for leading operatic sopranos. In the concert hall she performs regularly with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the English Concert, the latter of which took her on a tour of Asia.

Recordings by Bevan have appeared on Signum Classics, Delphian, and Champs Hill, among other labels. She entered the recording studio for the first time in 2012 on Stone Records with a volume in a Hugo Wolf song cycle, and her output grew steadily more active through the late 2010s and early 2020s. Two albums reached listeners in 2020: The Divine Muse, a recital of songs by Haydn, Schubert, and Wolf, and the multi-artist collection Love Lives Beyond the Tomb devoted to songs by Ian Venables.