Mhairi Lawson

Whilst still a student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Mhairi Lawson won the International Early Music  Network Young Artists Prize with the fortepianist Olga Tverskaya, which led to her first CD recording of Haydn’s English and Scottish Songs.

Mhairi Lawson has performed in opera houses and concert halls worldwide with such companies as English National Opera, Les Arts Florissants, The Gabrieli Consort & Players, The Academy of Ancient Music, The Early Opera Company and the  Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and with many leading conductors such as William Christie, Sir Charles Mackerras, Paul McCreesh, Jane Glover and Sir John Eliot Gardiner, in repertoire ranging from traditional folksong to opera.

With Les Arts Florissants, Lawson has performed dramatic music by Purcell, Charpentier, Landi and Monteverdi at the Cité de la Musique, Paris, and throughout Europe, including London’s Barbican Centre and Birmingham’s Symphony Hall. At the Wigmore Hall, she has performed operas by Purcell, Handel and Hasse with the Early Opera Company. She has  performed Handel’s Messiah in Amsterdam, Utrecht, Paris and Barcelona with the Netherlands Bach Society and the  Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

Lawson has enjoyed working with the Gabrieli Consort and Players for many years and projects with them include Bach’s St John Passion and St Matthew Passion, the Mass in B minor and the Wedding Cantata, Handel’s La resurrezione, and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, King Arthur and The Fairy Queen. She has sung Bach’s St John Passion in New York’s Lincoln Centre, and in Weimar, Germany, and the St Matthew Passion throughout Spain. At English National Opera she sang Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and King Arthur in productions with the Mark Morris Dance Group. Consequently, Lawson travelled to California for further performances of King Arthur with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, San Francisco.

Work with European symphony orchestras includes Handel’s Athalia in Madrid, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio in Zurich and Vivaldi’s Gloria and Mozart concert and operatic arias in Nantes, France. She has made many commercial recordings, most recently Haydn’s Creation with the Choir of New College, Oxford, conducted by Edward Higginbottom, and Scottish Jacobite Songs on the Avison Ensemble’s CD Rebellion. Forthcoming CD releases include two discs of Schubert Lieder, including the vocal tour de force Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, with clarinettist Jane Booth and pianist Eugene Asti.

With the virtuoso baroque band La Serenissima, Mhairi has recorded many of Vivaldi’s sacred and operatic works and has performed large-scale pieces including La senna festeggiante and La fida ninfa in Venice. Recital engagements include  songs from the British folksong tradition and Lieder by Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Strauss and Wolf with  appearances in the Edinburgh Festival, Newcastle and York Universities, and recordings for BBC Radio 3.

Recent and future highlights include Galatea Acis and Galatea in Vienna and at the Wigmore Hall, Iphis Jephtha at the  Salle Pleyel, Paris and the Barbican, and The Creation with Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort & Players; Dorinda Orlando for Opera Theatre Company conducted by Christian Curnyn and Vivaldi’s L’Olimpiade with La Serenissima at the Buxton Festival; recitals in the Belfast Festival and Brighton Early Music Festival; Bach Magnificat with Richard Egarr and the Academy of Ancient Music; Haydn’s The Seasons with Northern Sinfonia; Handel’s Ottone at the Theater an der Wien and Couperin’s Trois Leçons de ténèbres in a European tour with The King’s Consort.