Remembering Charles Brett

A memorial service for Charles will be held at HM Chapel Royal, Hampton Court Palace on Saturday 8th November 2025 at 2pm. There will be a reception afterwards. There is car parking space at Hampton Court. 

Charles’s widow Cécile asks that anyone planning to come, email her to let her know. 

Charles Brett, who has died aged 83, was a countertenor noted for his warm tone and clear articulation; he enjoyed a successful performing career in London, founded the Amaryllis Consort, an ensemble dedicated to performing madrigals and other works of the Renaissance, and later became a much sought-after teacher, recommending to students that before giving a concert they enjoy a glass of dry sherry “to loosen the vocal cords”.

Brett – who was the alto soloist on Roy Goodman’s famous 1963 recording of Allegri’s Miserere with the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, under David Willcocks – was, with Paul Esswood and James Bowman, one of the “big three” countertenors of the post-Alfred Deller generation. Yet having spent much of his career teaching at leading public schools he came rather too late to full-time performing to make as much of an impact as he might have.

The Amaryllis Consort came into being in 1983, consisting of singers – including the tenor Ian Partridge – who shared a passion for the subtleties of consort singing, with its demands on technique and musicianship. After their London debut that year the consort visited several European countries, concentrating at first on Italian madrigals before later embracing a wide range of a cappella music, both sacred and secular, under Brett’s direction. He also sang in a popular trio with Bowman and Michael Chance, billing themselves as the Three Countertenors, though they were not the only group to do so.

While a pupil at Lanesborough prep school in Guildford, young Charles taught himself piano. Only later did his parents seek out formal tuition for their talented son. He then went to Winchester, the family school, where his vocal abilities soon emerged.

In 1960 he won a choral scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied with John Whitworth, the influential countertenor, and was drawn to the work of Deller. Soon he took part in the first of several recordings, a disc entitled Music for the Chapel Royal featuring works by Henry Purcell, for which he was singled out by Gramophone magazine’s critic as “outstanding among the soloists”.

From 1963 Brett taught music at Eton, where he also sang in the chapel choir and gave tuition to a number of piano students, but he resigned in protest when the college announced the closure of its choir school. In 1968 he became director of music at Malvern College, where he also conducted the Malvern Music Society, before moving to Westminster School, staying there until 1983, although he told family and friends that he rarely felt appreciated.

While teaching at Eton he made his London debut in 1965 in a performance of Bach’s Magnificat. His appearances over the next couple of decades included a role in the quatercentenary performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers at Ely Cathedral in 1967 with April Cantelo and Robert Tear under the baton of John Eliot Gardiner and, four years later, in Purcell’s The Fairy Queen conducted by Benjamin Britten at the Proms, the first of seven appearances between then and 1982. Although he was largely heard in early music, Brett championed the music of several living composers, particularly John McLeod and Rory Boyle from Scotland.

Throughout his teaching career Brett maintained a steady profile as a performer but, freed from the tyranny of the classroom, he was able to pursue his singing with gusto, both as a soloist and with the consort. However, life took a difficult turn in the early 1990s, not least when he suffered a deep vein thrombosis that limited both his travelling and his breathing.

He turned instead to conducting, and against medical advice made his debut with the baton in 1995 in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at the Cervantino Festival in Mexico, a part of the world where he began to spend a good deal of time.

Later he returned to Britain and taught at the Royal Academy of Music and Gonville & Caius, Cambridge. He took up genealogy, quoting chapter and verse from Debrett’s on his artistic ancestor and building up a respectable collection of John Brett’s smaller paintings. He also edited two anthologies of songs for countertenors.

In 1973 he married Brigid Barstow. That was dissolved in 1994 when, in middle age, he suddenly shed his young-fogey image to became something of a ladies’ man. His second marriage, in 1998, was to Cecile; she survives him with the children of his first marriage, Francis, who sings baritone and now runs the Amaryllis Consort, and Caroline.

Charles Brett, born October 27 1941, died June 24 2025

Obituary taken from The Telegraph, 28th July 2025