27 Facts About Ian Bostridge

Ian Charles Bostridge CBE was born on 25 December 1964 and is an English tenor, well known for his performances as an opera and lieder singer.

Ian Bostridge 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.

Ian Bostridge made his Wigmore Hall debut in 1993, followed by an acclaimed Winterreise at the Purcell Room and his Aldeburgh Festival debut in 1994.

Ian Bostridge gave recitals in Lyon, Cologne, London and at the Aldeburgh, Cheltenham and Edinburgh Festivals in 1996 and at the Alte Oper, Frankfurt in 1997.

Ian Bostridge's first solo-featured recording was for Hyperion Records, a Britten song recital, The Red Cockatoo with Graham Johnson.

Ian Bostridge's subsequent recording of Die schone Mullerin in Hyperion's Franz Schubert Edition won the Gramophone's Solo Vocal Award for 1996.

Ian Bostridge 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 Roschmann and Graham Johnson, as part of the Hyperion Schumann edition.

Ian Bostridge's CDs have won all of the major record prizes including Grammy, Edison, Japanese Recording Academy, Brit, South Bank Show Award, Diapason d'Or de l'Annee, Choc de l'Annee, Echo Klassik and Deutsche Schallplattenpreis.

Ian Bostridge's recording of Schubert's "Die Forelle" with Julius Drake forms part of the soundtrack of the 2011 film Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.

Ian Bostridge made his operatic debut in 1994, aged 29, as Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream with Opera Australia at the Edinburgh Festival, directed by Baz Luhrmann.

Ian Bostridge has recorded Flute with Sir Colin Davis for Philips Classics; Belmonte with William Christie for Erato; Tom Rakewell under John Eliot Gardiner for Deutsche Grammophon ; and Captain Vere with Daniel Harding.

Ian Bostridge has written for The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Times, Financial Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Opernwelt, Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, Opera Now and The Independent.

In 2004, Ian Bostridge was made CBE for his services to music.

Ian Bostridge is an Hon RAM, honorary fellow of Corpus Christi College, St John's College, and Wolfson College Oxford, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of St Andrews in 2003.

Ian Bostridge gave the inaugural Nicholas Breakspear lecture, "Classical Attitudes: Latin and music through the ages" at the University of Trondheim in 2015; and the annual BIRTHA lecture, "Humanity in Song: Schubert's Winter Journey" at the University of Bristol in the same year.

Ian Bostridge delivered the Lincoln Kirstein Lecture, "Song and Dance", at NYU in 2016.

Ian Bostridge gave the Berlin Family Lectures at the University of Chicago in April 2021.

Ian Bostridge has had a Carte Blanche season at the Concertgebouw and further artistic residencies in Luxembourg, Hamburg, the Schubertiade Schwarzenberg and the Wigmore Hall.

On 11 November 2009 Ian Bostridge sang Agnus Dei from Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, at the Armistice Day service in Westminster Abbey.

Ian Bostridge performed Kurt Weill's anti-war Four Walt Whitman Songs in 2014.

Ian Bostridge has a long history with directing and performing The Threepenny Opera.

Ian Bostridge was for a time the music columnist for Standpoint magazine, the monthly publication launched in 2008 "to celebrate Western civilisation" and served on the magazine's advisory board.

Ian Bostridge has been Prospect magazine's classical columnist since 2023.

Ian Bostridge is a Youth Music Ambassador, a patron of the Music Libraries Trust and of the Macmillan Cancer Support Guards Chapel Carol Concert.

Ian Bostridge's bestselling book Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession was published by Faber and Faber in the UK and by Knopf in the US in January 2015.

In 1992, Ian Bostridge married the writer and publisher Lucasta Miller, and they have a son and a daughter.

Ian Bostridge's brother is the biographer and critic Mark Bostridge.