Caroline Taylor, soprano

Winner of the 2021 Emmy Destinn Young Singers Awards, Caroline Taylor studied as an Oglesby Scholar at the Royal Northern College of Music, generously supported by a Help Musicians UK Maidment Award. She is a recent British Youth Opera Serena Fenwick Young Artist and Emerging Artist at Longborough Festival Opera, a member of the Wigmore Hall French Song Exchange and an Oxford Lieder Emerging Artist for 2022/2023. She studies with Susan Roberts and Louise Winter.

This season, Caroline looks forward to making her role debut as Asteria in Handel’s Tamerlano with Cambridge Handel Opera Company. She also joins the Grange Festival as Kate and cover Elsie Maynard in The Yeomen of the Guard and performs Mozart’s Requiem (Tatton Singers) and Fauré’s Requiem (Manchester Camerata, Sheffield Philharmonic Chorus).

An RNCM Gold Medal finalist, Caroline won the 2018 Joyce and Michael Kennedy Strauss Award, the 2018 Sir Anthony Lewis Memorial Prize and the 2019 Dean and Chadlington Singing Competition. She also received Third Prize at the 2019 Maureen Lehane Vocal Awards. Caroline and her duo partner George Ireland were finalists in the London Song Festival’s British Art Song Competition, encompassing a masterclass with Dame Sarah Connolly. Most recently, Caroline was a semi-finalist in the Royal Over-seas League Singers’ Prize.

Her operatic roles include Chocholka and cover Vixen Sharp-Ears/The Cunning Little Vixen (Longborough Festival Opera), Adina/The Elixir of Love (Duchy Opera), Clori/L’Egisto (Hampstead Garden Opera), Lauretta/Gianni Schicchi (RNCM Opera), Giannetta and cover Adina/The Elixir of Love (King’s Head Theatre, Opera’r Ddraig), Helena/The Enchanted Island (British Youth Opera), She/Cupboard LoveGoverness/The Turn of the Screw and Miss Wordsworth/Albert Herring (Byre Opera), Papagena and cover Pamina/The Magic Flute (St Andrews Voices) and Sara in the World Premiere of Ben Kaye and Adam Gorb’s The Path to Heaven (RNCM, Psappha). 

Concert highlights include Britten’s Les Illuminations with the Northern Ballet Sinfonia, Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music with the Southbank Sinfonia at St John’s Smith Square and Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 at the Bridgewater Hall. Further concert repertoire includes Handel’s MessiahSaul and Jephtha, Vivaldi’s Gloria, Bach’s St John Passion,  Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem and Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Antarctica

Caroline is a former Leeds Lieder Young Artist and Concordia Foundation Artist, with whom she made her solo debuts at St Martin in the Fields and St James’s Piccadilly. In 2021, Caroline and pianist George Needham gave the World Premiere of Jen Hartley and Kerry Darbishire’s Lakeland Song Cycle at the inaugural Cumbria Opera Festival. She is a keen recitalist and especially enjoys performing works by Debussy, Britten and Richard Strauss.