Charles Daniels tenor

The tenor Charles Daniels is best known as an interpreter of Baroque music, but his narrative gifts have been praised for music as various as Machaut’s virelais and Graham Treacher’s Divine Madness (2016). He was born in Salisbury and studied at King’s College Cambridge, and under Edward Brooks at the Royal College of Music.

He is a much recorded artist; his recordings include Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo with Andrew Parrott, Bach’s St Matthew Passion with the J. S. Bach-Stiftung, Handel’s Messiah, Schütz’s Weihnachtshistorie and Monteverdi’s Vespers with the Gabrieli Consort, Wojciech Kilar’s Missa pro Pace with the Warsaw Philharmonic, and John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. He also participated in much of the King’s Consort’s complete Purcell series, Bach cantatas for the All Of Bach project with the Netherlands Bach Society and the J. S. Bach-Stiftung, and more intimate discs such as Senfl’s Tenorlied with Fretwork, Heracleitus with the Bridge Quartet, and Lambert airs with Fred Jacobs.

He has toured the world as a concert performer; highlights include Handel’s Messiah under the baton of Nicolaus Harnoncourt in Vienna, secular Bach cantatas conducted by Masaaki Suzuki in Japan, Purcell’s Fairy Queen in the BBC Promenade concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, Kilar’s Missa pro Pace for the Pope in Rome, many concerts in the Utrecht Early Music Festival, including Lawes songs with Les Voix Humaines and Cavalli’s Vespers with Concerto Palatino. Some of his highest altitude concerts took place on a South American tour with the Orlando Consort, at 2700m in Peru and 3600m in La Paz, Bolivia, where the audience, hearing medieval English polyphony for the first time, understood the texts completely – they hear them every Sunday in church – despite the unfamiliar sound world.

Charles has transcribed and edited numerous English songs from the 17th century, by Henry and William Lawes, John Jenkins, John Blow, and Henry Purcell. He completed Purcell’s unfinished Royal Ode Arise, my Muse (performed and broadcast for the Montreal Baroque Festival 2009) and supplied the missing voices for Gesualdo’s Sacrae Cantiones à 6 for concerts in Amsterdam with the Gesualdo Consort.