Ian Bostridge
Ian Charles Bostridge CBE is an English tenor, well known for his performances as an opera and lieder singer. Early life and education Bostridge was born in London, the son of Leslie Bostridge and Lillian (née Clark). His father was a chartered surveyor. Bostridge is the brother of writer and critic Mark Bostridge, and they are the great-grandsons of the Tottenham Hotspur goalkeeper from the early twentieth century, John "Tiny" Joyce. He was a Queen's Scholar at Westminster School. He attended St John's College, Oxford, where he secured a First in modern history and St John's College, Cambridge, where he received an M.Phil. degree in the history and philosophy of science. He was awarded his D.Phil. degree in history from Oxford in 1990, on the significance of witchcraft in English public life from 1650 to 1750, supervised by Sir Keith Thomas. He worked in television current affairs and documentaries for two years in London before becoming a British Academy post-doctoral fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, teaching political theory and eighteenth-century British history. His book Witchcraft and Its Transformations, c. 1650–1750 was published as an Oxford Historical Monograph in 1997. This book, "the most sophisticated and original of all recent histories of early modern demonology", according to Professor Stuart Clark, has been influential in the study of the pre-Enlightenment. It "achiev[es] that rarest of feats in the scholarly world: taking a well-worn subject and ensuring that it will never be looked at in quite the same way again" (Noel Malcolm, TLS). In 1991 he won the National Federation of Music Societies Award and from 1992 received support from the Young Concert Artists Trust. Career Debuts Bostridge began singing professionally only at age 27. He made his Wigmore Hall debut in 1993, followed by an acclaimed Winterreise at the Purcell Room and his Aldeburgh Festival debut in 1994. In 1995, he gave his first solo recital in the Wigmore Hall (winning the Royal Philharmonic Society's Debut Award). He gave recitals in Lyon, Cologne, London and at the Aldeburgh, Cheltenham and Edinburgh Festivals in 1996 and at the Alte Oper, Frankfurt in 1997. On the concert platform, he has appeared with the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Colin Davis and Mstislav Rostropovich, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Sir Charles Mackerras, and the City of Birmingham Symphony and Berlin Philharmonic under Sir Simon Rattle. His first solo-featured recording was for Hyperion Records, a Britten song recital, The Red Cockatoo with Graham Johnson. His subsequent recording of Die schöne Müllerin in Hyperion's Franz Schubert Edition won the Gramophone's Solo Vocal Award for 1996. He won the prize again in 1998 for a recording of Robert Schumann Lieder with his regular collaborator, the pianist Julius Drake and again in 2003 for Schumann's Myrthen and duets with Dorothea Röschmann and Graham Johnson, as part of the Hyperion Schumann edition. An EMI Classics exclusive artist since 1996, he is a 15-time Grammy Award nominee and 3-time winner. His CDs have won all of the major record prizes