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The English baritone, Johnny Herford, grew up in Oxfordshire and sang as a treble in Choir of New College, Oxford. He went on to study at Cambridge University and the Royal Academy of Music, where his teacher was Mark Wildman. He is a Samling scholar and Britten-Pears Young Artist, and currently studies with Russell Smythe. He won the Song Prize at the 2013 Kathleen Ferrier Awards, and the Jean Meikle Duo Prize at the 2013 Wigmore Hall International Song Competition.
Johnny Herford enjoys singing a wide range of repertoire, with a particular interest in contemporary and 20th-century music. He has sung principal roles in operas by Judith Weir, Jonathan Dove, Kim Ashton and Danyal Dhondy, and memorably in the world premiere of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ Kommilitonen. Other operatic performances have included The Magic Flute (Papageno), Albert Herring (Sid), and The Merry Widow (Danilo).
On the concert platform Johnny Herford appears as a soloist in music from Monteverdi to the present day, including J.S. Bach’s Passions (BWV 244, BWV 245), B-Minor Mass (BWV 232) and Christmas Oratorio (BWV 248), Haydn’s Seasons, Felix Mendelssohn’s Elijah, Johannes Brahms’ German Requiem, Gustav Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder, and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Five Mystical Songs. He sang the baritone solo in the UK premiere of Sibelius’s Kuolema with the English Chamber Orchestra at Kings Place.
As a recitalist Johnny Herford performs music by Schubert, Robert Schumann, Gabriel Fauré and many more of the great song-composers, appearing at the Wigmore Hall, at Kings Place, at the Oxford Lieder Festival and on BBC Radio 3′s ‘In Tune’. Repertoire has included Schubert’s Winterreise and Die Schöne Müllerin, R. Schumann’s Myrthen, Benjamin Britten’s Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, and Butterworth’s Six Songs from ‘A Shropshire Lad’.
Johnny Herford is represented by O W L Artist Management. |
