JULIAN PODGER’s musical career started whilst still at school in Kassel, Germany, where he first established himself as a singer and conductor. Taking up a choral award at Trinity College Cambridge he then began his study of singing and his research into historical performance practice; and founded Trinity Baroque, with whom he has since continued his directing activities. As a soloist he has been much in demand all over Europe, the Far East, Australia and the USA. Highlights include recordings of Bach cantatas as part of the Monteverdi Ltd. Bach cantata pilgrimage, of psalm settings by Lili Boulanger, both with John Eliot Gardiner; Bach cantatas with Andrew Parrott and the Taverner Consort at the Ansbach Bach Festival; regular invitations to tour the Netherlands with Bach's Matthäus-Passion with the Nederlandse Bachvereniging and Jos van Veldhoven; and, most recently, a recording of English lutesongs by Dowland, Byrd and others of the late 16th/ early 17th centuries. He has specialised particularly in the role of evangelist for Bach’s passions, and performed them with Seattle conductor Stephen Stubbs in Bratislava, with Paul Hillier in Tallinn and Riga, with The Scottish Chamber Orchestra in Edinburgh and with the Regensburger Domspatzen in Munich. He has sung in many major concert venues, including the Royal Albert Hall, the Mozarteum, Salzburg, the Konzerthaus, Vienna, the Palau de la Musica, Barcelona and the Teatro alla Scala, Milan; and with conductors Philippe Herreweghe, Reinhard Goebel (with Musica Antiqua Köln) and Thomas Hengelbrock. Invitations have further included solo recitals at the Händelhaus in Halle (broadcast by the Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk) and in Montevideo, which included a workshop in singing and performance practice for De Profundis; a tour of Bach cantatas in Israel with The Israel Camerata, of Handel`s Alexander`s Feast in Spain with The English Concert and a series of Bach`s Matthäus-Passion in Toronto with with Tafelmusik. Operatic ventures have taken him to the Hokutopia International Music Festival, Tokyo, to sing the lead role in Monteverdi’s L'Orfeo, frequently to Berlin for rarely performed operas by Reinhard Keiser (1674-1734), to Melbourne as Ulisse, in Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria, and to the Boston Early Music Festival in Boris Gudenov by Johann Mattheson (1681-1764). He sang the part of Daniel in the mediaeval Play of Daniel with Andrew Lawrence-King in London, Cambridge and York, and re-runs of Ulisse have taken him to the Teatro la Fenice in Venice and to the Edinburgh Festival. In a tour of the Netherlands later this year he will sing the part of Devil in the newly composed Mariken in the Garden of Pleasures by Calliope Tsoupaki with the Dutch opera company Opera2Day.
Ensemble musicianship is also one of his main pursuits; he is a member of one of the world’s leading mediaeval ensembles, Gothic Voices, The Harp Consort and a regular guest with I Fagiolini and Theatre of Voices, Copenhagen. As a musical director he runs his own ensemble Trinity Baroque, with whom he recorded Bach’s motets with solo-voices, and of other choral works by Bach (Decca) in collaboration with The English Concert and Berlin Philharmonic oboist Albrecht Mayer. He has conducted the ensemble in well-received performances of Morales’ Missa Mille Regretz at the Festival de Musica Antigua en Sevilla, of Schütz` Musikalische Exequien and Johannes-Passion at the Festival Oude Muziek Utrecht and of Bach’s Johannes-Passion accompanied by the Wroclaw Baroque Orchester in the Filharmonia Wroclaw; and has guest-conducted the ensemble Florilegium with performances of Handel’s Messiah, Israel in Egypt, Bach’s Weihnachtsoratorium and Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas, King Arthur and The Fairy Queen in London, Paris and Las Palmas.
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