Nicky Spence

Tenor Nicky Spence stepped away from an established path as a crossover vocalist in order to establish himself on the operatic stage. His performances have taken him to major houses throughout the United Kingdom, the United States, and across mainland Europe.

Born in Dumfries, Scotland, in 1983, Spence began singing in public while still a youngster and captured first prize in a regional contest at age fourteen. To finance his studies at Wallace Hall Academy he took a job in a fish-and-chips shop; there he worked with Margaret Davies and encountered visiting national theater ensembles. He later entered the Guildhall School of Music in London, where he received the Kathleen Ferrier Scholarship Award. By the time he completed his studies in 2005, Universal Classics and Jazz had already signed him with plans to market him as “the Scottish tenor.” His first album, My First Love, appeared the following year.

The recording brought Spence several honors and led to television appearances in Britain as well as concert dates alongside Shirley Bassey. Nevertheless he chose to redirect his career, returning to Guildhall to pursue conventional opera training under John Llewelyn Evans. His decision proved sound: in 2009 he secured a place at the National Opera Studio and received the Bruce Millar Gulliver Opera Prize. The next year he joined the resident ensemble of English National Opera, where he remained throughout the 2010s. With that company he originated the role of Brian in Nico Muhly’s Two Boys in 2011 and portrayed Francesco in a 2015 Terry Gilliam staging of Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini. During the same period he was featured on song recitals issued by Naxos, Stone, and Chandos. He repeated the Muhly role at the Metropolitan Opera in 2013 and has since sung at houses such as Frankfurt Opera, where he appeared in Rossini’s La gazza ladra in 2014, and Opéra de Lyon, where he took part in Janáček’s The House of the Dead in 2019. Additional recordings have appeared on Hyperion, Resonus Classics, and Albion, the last of these including two volumes of Ralph Vaughan Williams folk-song arrangements released in 2020 and 2021. Throughout the pandemic years Spence also worked as a volunteer vaccinator.