Catherine Bott, 2025

Catherine Bott was at one time such a familiar and friendly figure at the York Early Music Festival – she was an Artistic Adviser from 2003 to 2007, a regular compere of the Young Artists Competition, and presented live editions of Radio 3’s Early Music Show here – that it was often easy to forget that one of the most influential performers of the British early music movement was among us. Here was a soprano whose precise and crystal-clear voice was not only a perfect tonal complement to leading ensembles of the 1980s and ’90s such as the New London Consort and the Academy of Ancient Music, but also linked to an incisive musical intelligence as an interpreter of anything from a Spanish medieval cantiga to a Bach Passion, or a Purcell song to a Handel aria, that made her a compelling presence on the concert scene.

Highlights of her rich discography, many made with favourite musical partners, include: a reeling examination of the mad-scenes of Restoration theatre; a dazzling album of virtuoso 17th-century Italian song; a stirring performance as Salome in Stradella’s oratorio San Giovanni Battista with Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre; Convivencia, an album of songs and poetry from medieval Andalusia with guitarist David Miller and oud-player Abdul Salam Kheir; and one of the most finely nuanced Purcell Didos on record with Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music (a recording which won a coveted ‘Building a Library Choice’ recommendation on Radio 3’s Record Review programme).

Her performances at the Festival itself have been memorable ones, including an evening of music from the London pleasure gardens with pianist David Owen-Norris at Harewood House, an atmospheric late-night solo concert of Spanish cantigas in the Lady Chapel in York Minster, and a recital of romances from the time of the reconquista with David Miller on vihuela.

Across this wide range of musical styles and circumstances, Catherine’s technical excellence has worked in harness with an unsleeping concern to communicate, as if to prove that any piece of music must have its own voice, and something to say – an approach summed up well in Gramophone magazine’s review of Convivencia which remarked that ‘her vocalism digs into the text with a rare commitment worthy of spoken theatre’. And indeed, for Catherine, performing is as much about acting as it is about singing. Remembering her Salome, Marc Minkowski observed that ‘in iconography Salome’s always represented as a young girl, but in the legend she’s a young girl with a lot of seducing power; in the Stradella she’s transforming herself into an awful monster, and Catherine made this contrast superbly. Her voice has the flexibility to be childish and at the same tine to be natural with those incredible low chest sounds’. Small wonder, then, that such ventriloquism has resulted in career surprises such as standing in as the singing voice of Miss Elizabeth Bennett in the 1995 BBC TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice!

Virtuosic, communicative, witty, funny, thoughtful, dramatic, Kate (as we know her) is a thoroughly deserving addition to our rosta of Lifetime Achievers.