Claire Booth

Claire Booth has become internationally renowned both for her commitment to an almost unparalleled breadth of repertoire, and for the vitality and musicianship that she brings to the operatic stage and concert platform. 

Operatic highlights alone range from the title role in Handel’s Berenice to boy in Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill both for the Royal Opera; from Irene in Vivaldi’s Bajazet for Irish National Opera to Nora in Vaughan Williams’ Riders to the Sea for English National Opera; from the title role in Janacek’s Cunning Little Vixen for Garsington Opera to Dorinda in Handel’s Orlando for Scottish Opera. Collaborations with Welsh National Opera alone sees Rossini heroines Rosina Il Barbiere di Siviglia and Elcia in Mose in Egitto sit alongside the role of Pakati in Jonathan Harvey’s Wagner Dream (which she premiered for Nederlandse Oper), plus a production of Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine which earned her Best Actress at the Welsh Theatre Awards.

Having given close to 100 work premieres in her career to date, her numerous concert appearances have resulted in close associations with the BBC Orchestras (Symphony, Scottish Symphony and Philharmonic) and the BBC Proms, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Mahler Chamber Orchestra and Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Aldeburgh and Holland Festivals and other recent debut appearances singing such diverse repertoire as Strauss and Mozart, Takemitsu and Knussen with the Berlin Deutsche Symphonie, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Prague Radio Symphony, Tokyo Philharmonic, Orquester di Galicia and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. This year Booth performed Strauss’ Four Last Songs for the first time in Germany and Galicia both with Jonathon Heyward.

Conductors Claire Booth has worked with include Pierre Boulez, Martyn Brabbins, Gustavo Dudamel, Edward Gardner, Richard Hickox, Yannick Nezet-Seguin, Carlo Rizzi, Ilan Volkov and  Simone Young.

For more than a decade she has collaborated with video director Netia Jones to produce a series of critically acclaimed productions. These include her performances of Kurtag’s Kafka Fragments and Haas’ Atthis, both for The Royal Opera, and also Max in Knussen’s Where the Wild Things Are and Rhoda in Higglety, Piggelty, Pop! which toured from the Aldeburgh Festival via The Los Angeles Philharmonic and a further debut under Gustavo Dudamel, to the Barbican’s own 60th birthday celebrations for the composer. Other notable collaborations include her reimagining of Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben with pianist Alistair Hogarth and Jazz legend Jason Rebello, her series of recordings with Christopher Glynn, including vocal retrospectives of Grainger, Grieg and Mussorgsky, plus her continuing work with director Adele Thomas which recently revealed a stand out performance as Agrippina in In the Realms of Sorrow for the London Handel Festival.

2024 is Schoenberg’s 150th anniversary (13 September is his birthday) and as a stalwart advocate she is performing his work widely at Aldeburgh Festival, Wigmore Hall, Corbridge festival, Oxford International Festival of Song, Royal Northern Sinfonia, Schoenberg Centre and Music in the Round. She also has two Schoenberg CDs being released in May (Expressionist Music on Orchid Classics) and September (Portraits of Pierrot on Nimbus Records). 

The RDMR contact for this client is Rebecca