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.

Early life

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 Hüsch at the Munich Hochschule für Musik (1959–1961). Whilst in Munich, along with Thomas Binkley, Sterling Jones and Andrea von Ramm, he was a founder member of the pioneering medieval ensemble, Studio der Frühen Musik (Early Music Quartet) with which he worked for around three years, leaving the group in December 1963. He made 11 recordings with them between 1962 and 1970, including the award winning album of John Dowland on the Archiv label released in 1966.

Opera career

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 great-great grandchildren of President of Mexico Valentín Canalizo, Antonio Haas Canalizo, patron of the Mazatlán Opera House "Teatro Ángela Peralta", classical and jazz pianist, and founder of the Mazatlán Conservatory of Music and the Mazatlán Literature Award in Sinaloa state, Mexico, and his niece, soprano, jazz singer, castanets soloist, singer-songwriter and member of royalty, Lady Marina De Santiago-de Borbón Haas Canalizo (Lady Marina of Bourbon), Queen of Spain Isabella II of Bourbon's great-great granddaughter, invited Nigel Rogers to the city of Mazatlán. There he was acquainted with different styles of Mexican music, Mariachi, and Mexican Carnival band music. Nigel became a close long-standing friend of Lady Marina of Bourbon, and the Haas Canalizo family, founders and former inhabitants of today's "Haas House Museum" (Casa Museo Haas) in Mazatlán, the family's mansion where Nigel stayed during his visit to Mazatlán before it was turned into a museum by the government of Sinaloa.

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.

References

• Baker's Biographical Dictionary of 20th Century Classical Musicians (1997)
• Excélsior Newspaper, printed, Mexico, cultural section (July 1993)
• BBC Radio 3, London, Nigel Rogers interviews and broadcasts of his recordings
• El Noroeste Newspaper, printed, Mexico, Mazatlan city and Sinaloa State (7 May 1994)
• El Noroeste Newspaper, printed, Mexico, Mazatlan city and Sinaloa State (10 May 1994)
• Wigmore Hall, Rogers 70th birthday