Specializing in Baroque opera and choral music, Paul Agnew stands among the leading tenors active in those fields and maintains an extensive performance history that spans numerous countries and centuries. Midway through his professional life he also took up the baton, becoming the initial leader outside founder William Christie to direct the acclaimed French Baroque ensemble Les Arts Florissants.
Born in Glasgow on April 11, 1964, Agnew studied at Magdalen College, Oxford University, as a choral scholar and sang in the college’s renowned chapel choir while completing his academic work. Upon graduation he entered a thriving London early-music community that offered abundant engagements for emerging vocalists. He appeared with the Consort of Musicke and performed at different points with The Sixteen, Gothic Voices, and The Tallis Scholars. Beginning a solo career in the early 1990s, he caught Christie’s notice and received an invitation to relocate to France for performances with Les Arts Florissants. He rapidly became the ensemble’s principal soloist, taking leading parts in productions such as Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie that toured throughout France and reached New York. Although a tenor by training, Agnew also cultivated the high-register French haute-contre voice; he has occasionally been labeled a countertenor, yet the haute-contre he helped revive in the 1990s, of which he was among the rare practitioners, employs markedly less falsetto. While much of his activity has centered on Les Arts Florissants, Agnew has sung in English as well, recording songs by Ivor Gurney and, in 2001, Beethoven’s settings of English-language folk songs. He has appeared in large-scale choral works by Bach and others and has documented English voice-and-lute repertory with lutenist Christopher Wilson.
In 2007 Agnew began directing Les Arts Florissants as associate conductor; he assumed the podium with increasing frequency and was subsequently appointed joint music director. Conducting the ensemble in 2018, he issued a recording devoted to the little-known French Baroque motet composers Sébastien de Brossard and Pierre Bouteiller. Christie continues as artistic director, yet Agnew has taken the group’s helm more regularly. He has also guided repertory outside the French Baroque, launching recorded cycles of the madrigals of Monteverdi and Gesualdo during the 2010s and 2020s. The Gesualdo project reached completion in 2023 with releases of the composer’s Fifth and Sixth Books of Madrigals together with the Tenebrae Responsories.
