Iestyn Davies

Iestyn Davies, born on 16 September 1979 in York, England, is a British classical countertenor recognized internationally as a soloist in Baroque music and opera. His Broadway credits include Farinelli and the King, in which he performed at the Belasco Theatre beginning in December 2017, with the production running for sixteen weeks. Mark Rylance appeared in the same production as King Philippe V of Spain. Davies had previously performed the role at Shakespeare's Globe and in London's West End before bringing it to New York.

Davies's early musical formation began with piano and recorder, guided in part by his father Ioan, a long-standing cellist with the Fitzwilliam Quartet. From the age of eight he sang as a boy treble in the Choir of St John's College, Cambridge, and took up countertenor singing during his teenage years at Wells Cathedral School. He later returned to St John's College as a choral scholar, completing a degree in Archaeology and Anthropology. He earned his DipRAM from the Royal Academy of Music, which subsequently appointed him ARAM and, in 2012, elected him a Fellow. In 2004 he received the Audience Prize at the London Handel Singing Competition, and in 2010 the Royal Philharmonic Society named him Young Artist of the Year. He was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to music.

His operatic career spans major international houses and a wide range of repertoire. He has sung Ottone in Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea at both Zürich Opera and Glyndebourne Festival Opera, and performed in Handel's Partenope as Arsace for New York City Opera and as Armindo for English National Opera. His Britten credits include Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream for Houston Grand Opera and at English National Opera, and Apollo in Death in Venice for English National Opera, the latter also marking his first full operatic performance for La Scala. He sang Hamor in Handel's Jephtha for both Welsh National Opera and Opéra National de Bordeaux, and Creonte in Agostino Steffani's Niobe at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 2010. At the Metropolitan Opera in New York he appeared as Unulfo in Handel's Rodelinda in 2011, returning in 2020 to sing Ottone in Handel's Agrippina. In April 2021 he sang with English National Opera in a socially distanced performance of Handel's Messiah at the London Coliseum, conducted from the harpsichord by Laurence Cummings and broadcast by BBC Two. In February 2022 he performed Bach's Mass in B minor with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra under Richard Egarr.

Davies has appeared in concert at venues including Teatro alla Scala with Gustavo Dudamel, the Concertgebouw and the Tonhalle with Ton Koopman, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Lincoln Center, and the Barbican. In September 2013 he was the guest soloist in Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms at the Last Night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall. He has collaborated with numerous orchestras, among them the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Academy of Ancient Music, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the Hallé Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Britten Sinfonia, and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, as well as many period-instrument ensembles. His conducting collaborators have included John Eliot Gardiner, Charles Mackerras, Emmanuelle Haïm, Harry Christophers, Kent Nagano, and Frans Brüggen, among many others. His discography includes a Wigmore Live CD from 2010 documenting a 2009 recital with his own Ensemble Guadagni, in addition to three recordings made during his years as a treble chorister.