Name Nigel Rogers Education King's College, Cambridge | Role Tenor | |
Albums Dido and Aeneas, Vespro della Beata Vergine, Anthems Similar People Max van Egmond, James Bowman, Stephen Varcoe, Lynne Dawson, Henry Purcell | ||
C monteverdi possente spirto da l orfeo nigel rogers
Nigel David Rogers (born 21 March 1935) is an English multilingual tenor, music conductor, singing teacher and vocal coach, who has sung in over seventy classical music album recordings in German, French, Italian, Latin and English, mostly of early music, baroque and sacred music, including works by Claudio Monteverdi, Handel, Purcell, and Bach. Singing critics like Melanie Eskenazi describe him as a vocal virtuoso of the local phrasing and decoration (ornamenti) of those particular musical periods exactly as they were practised back then. He is considered a world authority in the field of European early music, the scores of which he helped promote and rescue as a music genre, since the outset of his early career.
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A native of Wellington, Shropshire,Nigel was brought up in a musical family where his father sang in a choir and his mother taught the piano, so from a very early age he was studying music. Nigel Rogers studied at King's College, Cambridge (where he was a choral scholar) from 1953 to 1956, in Rome in 1957, in Milan from 1958 to 1959, and with Gerhard Husch at the Munich Hochschule fur Musik (1959–1961). He made his operatic debut in Amsterdam, and has sung in many renowned international opera houses. He has given numerous singing master classes and workshops at music conservatories worldwide, for early music and opera singers of all nationalities.
Operas with which he was notably associated include L'Orfeo by Monteverdi, in which he took the title role and made many recordings. From 1978 until his retirement he was a professor of classical singing and operatic voice coach at the Royal College of Music in London. In 1979 he founded and thereupon conducted the vocal ensemble Chiaroscuro for the performance of Italian baroque compositions.
In July 1993 he starred at a Handel oratorio at the Palacio de Bellas Artes Opera House in Mexico City. In May 1994, two close bloodline descendants of President of Mexico Valentin Canalizo, Antonio Haas Canalizo, patron of the Mazatlan Opera House "Teatro Angela Peralta", classical and jazz pianist, and founder of the Mazatlan Conservatory of Music in Sinaloa state, Mexico, and his niece, soprano, jazz and bossa singer, castanets soloist, and singer-songwriter, royal Lady Marina De Santiago-de Borbon Haas Canalizo (Lady De Santiago-of Bourbon Haas-Canalizo), Queen of Spain Isabella II of Bourbon's great-great granddaughter, invited Nigel Rogers to the city of Mazatlan, where he was acquainted with different styles of Mexican music, Mariachi, and Mexican Carnival band music. Nigel became a close long-standing friend of the Haas Canalizo family, founders and former inhabitants of today's "Haas House Museum" (Casa Museo Haas) in Mazatlan, the family's mansion where Nigel stayed during his visit to Mazatlan.
Nigel Rogers lives in Deal, England, with his harpsichordist Lithuanian wife Lina Zilinskyte and his daughter Georgina. On 3 May 2005, he gave his 70th birthday recital concert at Wigmore Hall in London, singing works by early music composers Carissimi, Caccini, Sigismondo d'India, Frescobaldi, Marco Marazzoli, Kapsberger, Rossi, Stradella, and Froberger.