Catherine Bott

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Catherine Bott (September 11, 1952) is an English soprano with an international reputation as a baroque specialist. Following her studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, with Arthur Reckless, she began her career as a member of the English baroque-jazz crossover group, the Swingles. By 1980 she had begun appearing frequently in the New London Consort and thereafter began performing across the world in Europe, Latin America and the USSR with several other period-instrument groups.^[1]

As a singer she is recognised as a virtuoso of the baroque idiom. Her purity, accuracy of pitch and the mellifluous quality of her voice allow her to attain an acute perception of each part she plays, and meanwhile create a heightened vocal sensuality exceptional among the majority of today's sopranos.

She has recorded extensively, as Dido in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (with Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music in 1994), with King's College, Cambridge lead by Stephen Cleobury in Bach's St. John Passion, as Venus in Blow’s Venus and Adonis with Philip Pickett and Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea with Sir John Eliot Gardiner.

Recently, and perhaps unexpectedly, Bott has been called in by conductors to perform and record much more recent repertoire, for example with Sir John Eliot Gardiner in Fauré's Requiem, Vaughan Williams' Sinfonia Antarctica and Nielsen’s Third Symphony with Bryden Thomson and the Royal Scottish Orchestra. Likewise, she is much in demand among contemporary composers such as Michael Nyman and Jonathan Dove.

She is one of three presenters of The Early Music Show on BBC Radio 3 (with Andrew Manze and Lucie Skeaping) on Saturdays and Sundays 13:00 - 14:00.