Ian Bostridge is perhaps the best-known English tenor to emerge since the death of Peter Pears. He has become closely associated with the songs of Schubert as well as with the music of Benjamin Britten.

Bostridge was born on December 25, 1964, in London. Before becoming a singer, he obtained his PhD in history and philosophy from St. John's College of Oxford. However, reaching the finals of both the Kathleen Ferrier and Richard Tauber Competitions and winning the 1991 National Federation of Music Societies/Esso Award proved decisive in moving him toward a career in singing. The Young Concert Artists Trust gave him a financial grant to develop his career, and he debuted at Wigmore Hall in London in 1993. One of his most important early recitals was in 1994 at the Purcell Room, where he gave a highly acclaimed performance of Schubert's Winterreise. In the same year, he made his first appearance at the Aldeburgh Festival. Since then, he has become strongly associated with the music of the festival's founder, Benjamin Britten. He made his first New York appearances in 1998 at the Frick Collection and in 1999 at Alice Tully Hall. In 1998, he debuted at the Munich Festival in L'incoronazione di Poppea. His debut with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra was in 1999.

His operatic debut was in 1994 at the Covent Garden Festival's production of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream. In 1995, he sang his first solo recital at Wigmore Hall and increased his European recital presence with appearances in Lyon and Cologne. His debut with the English National Opera was in Mozart's The Magic Flute in 1996, and he was acclaimed for his seductive portrayal in Britten's The Turn of the Screw at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. In 2010, he sang in the premiere of Henze's Opfergang, a setting for voices and orchestra of a poem by Franz Werfel.

He is in much demand as a recital singer, and in that capacity, has sung on several volumes of Hyperion's epochal complete Schubert song collection (including the recording of Die schöne Müllerin) and has issued several freestanding collections of Schubert songs. Bostridge has also issued recordings of Robert Schumann's Dichterliebe, songs of Reynaldo Hahn, a program of little-known Britten songs, and one volume of Jecklin-Disc's set of the complete songs of Othmar Schoeck. Three Baroque Tenors, music written for the era's famous voices (all of them sung by Bostridge himself), was released in 2011. Bostridge's concert repertory recordings include Bach's Magnificat and St. Matthew Passion, Handel's Israel in Egypt, Stravinsky's Cantata, most of the Britten orchestral song cycles for tenor voice, the Mozart Requiem, Finzi's Die Natalis, Rossini's Petite Messe Solennelle, and Michael Nyman's Noises, Sounds, & Sweet Airs.

In the 2010s and 2020s, Bostridge has recorded mostly for the PentaTone and Warner Classics labels. The year 2016 saw two significant Bostridge album releases. One, Songs of Our Ancestors, was a duo with guitarist Xuefei Yang and featured both Western and Chinese repertory (and led to an Asian tour by the pair). His operatic recordings include Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, and Thomas Adès' The Tempest. Bostridge's album of orchestral Shakespeare songs with conductor Antonio Pappano was honored with a Grammy Award for solo vocals in 2017. In 2020, Bostridge, accompanied by Pappano, issued a recording of Beethoven's songs and folksongs in celebration of the composer's 250th birthday. Bostridge has earned at least 15 Grammy nominations, with three wins, along with a variety of other top classical prizes, as well as designation as Commander of the British Empire. He remained active through the COVID-19 pandemic, issuing an album of Respighi songs in 2021, the Baroque aria recital Tormento d'Amore and a recording of Schubert's Schwanengesang in 2022, and The Folly of Desire, an album with, and featuring classical songs by, pianist Brad Mehldau, in 2023.

Switching to singing did not put an end to Bostridge's academic writing, and those two aspects of his career have reinforced each other. His 1997 book Witchcraft and Its Transformations did not touch directly on music but achieved a wide general readership. He has written two books on music, A Singer's Notebook (2011) and the much-praised (and much-translated) Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession (2015). Bostridge married writer, editor, and publisher Lucasta Miller in 1992, and the couple have raised a son and a daughter. ~ Joseph Stevenson & James Manheim

Baroque violinist Fabio Biondi has been a pioneer in historically informed musical performance in his native Italy, both as a soloist and as the leader of his own Europa Galante ensemble. His sharp, energetic style has continued to influence the performance of Baroque music even as he has broadened his repertory across a 300-year period.

Biondi was born in Palermo, on the island of Sicily, on March 15, 1961. He showed talent in his violin lessons with Salvatore Cicero, who later bequeathed to him the use of the Carlo Ferdinando Gagliano violin of 1766 that he would play as an adult. By 12, Biondi was performing concertos with the RAI National Symphony Orchestra. One decisive turning point came when he met historically oriented violin players as a teen and immediately became fascinated by the Baroque and Classical forms of the instrument (which differ from the modern ones in their strings, bridges, and bows rather than in the body of the instrument itself). When he was 16, he gave a concert on Baroque violin at Vienna's famed Musikverein, and he formed his own historical-instrument string quartet, the Stendhal Quartet, soon after that; the group did not focus exclusively on Baroque and Classical music but simply performed all its music, which included several commissioned contemporary compositions, on temporally appropriate instruments. Biondi went on to study at the Rome Conservatory, winning the school's first prize in violin. He performed with leading historical-instrument groups, including Jordi Savall's Hespèrion XX (now Hespèrion XXI) and Les Musiciens du Louvre in the late '80s. Biondi's breakthrough came after he formed the Baroque ensemble Europa Galante in 1990. The group's recording debut came almost immediately, with the album Vivaldi: String Concerti on the Opus 111 label.

At the time, Europa Galante was the first historical-instrument Baroque group in Italy, which had lagged behind northwestern Europe, Britain, and Austria in the field. Pent-up demand brought the group immediate success; within a few years, the group had made several best-selling recordings, including one of Vivaldi's Four Seasons violin concertos that sold 500,000 copies, and Europa Galante had snared invitations to prestigious venues, including New York's Lincoln Center, the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome (one of several venues where they have backed opera productions), and London's Royal Albert Hall. Biondi has also conducted modern symphony orchestras, including the Radio France Philharmonic and the Gran Canaria Symphony Orchestra.

Biondi's recording career has been marked by extensive activity as both a violinist and conductor. As a soloist, he has recorded for Opus 111, Virgin Classics, and Glossa, releasing a 2019 recording, The 1690 "Tuscan" Stradivari, on the latter label. The previous year, he had conducted Europa Galante in a historical-instrument performance of Verdi's early opera Macbeth. Biondi and Europa Galante released several albums in 2022, including Mendelssohn, which featured a selection of the composer's works for strings. By that year, Biondi's catalog comprised some 100 recordings. ~ James Manheim

Europa Galante was Italy's first dedicated period-instrument Baroque ensemble and has earned a reputation as one of Europe's finest and most stylish such orchestras. While its focus has been on Italian composers of the Baroque, the group has also performed and recorded the works of Baroque composers from throughout Europe. In the 2021-2022 season, Europa Galante toured several different programs in Europe and Asia, and in 2022, it issued the recording Opera in Musica: Carlo Monza Quartets.

Europa Galante was founded in 1989 by Italy's leading period violinist, Fabio Biondi, at the instigation of a record company executive, Yolanta Skura. Skura, a recording engineer who had trained as a pianist, began planning to go into business in the late 1980s with her own label, Opus 111. She decided to sign unknown but excellent musicians in whom she had confidence and could watch over the development of their careers, a process she says is in contrast to the approach of big companies. One of the most interesting young musicians of the time was Fabio Biondi, a violinist from Sicily, who had become interested in the Baroque violin while studying at the Rome Conservatory. Biondi had debuted as a Baroque violinist in the esteemed Musikverein of Vienna at 16, and through the 1980s, he worked with some of the leading international-rank period groups. Skura suggested that he found his own Baroque period ensemble in the interest of developing an Italian approach to authentic performances. Europa Galante derives its name from the galante style of music that developed after the height of Baroque music and was known for its simpler, direct technical means. The new ensemble was an immediate hit in Italy, where it was hailed as a symbol of the rebirth of Baroque music there. Stereo Review likened the effect of its fresh approach to Baroque music to seeing a well-restored painting by Caravaggio or Tiepolo.

Europa Galante was the top act on the Opus 111 label. The group's recording of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons stood out among the several dozen versions of that work and became the label's top-selling album. It was named the best recording of the year by sources in at least five countries. Soon, the ensemble was a familiar guest at international music festivals, as well as great recital and concert halls. Biondi, who loves the human voice, eagerly accepted offers to lead the group in Baroque opera and oratorio performances. These included the modern premiere of Handel's Poro, Caldara's La Passione de Gesù Cristo, and Alessandro Scarlatti's La Maddalena and Humanità e Lucifero; these works were also recorded and later released.

Late in the 1990s, Europa Galante and Biondi accepted an offer to join EMI's Virgin label. Its first release was another highly successful Vivaldi project, L'estro armonico. It also released the Caldara Passion on the Virgin Veritas imprint. Further efforts included discs of Vivaldi's Les Quatre Saisons (2007), Boccherini (2009), and Ercole (2011). Since then, the group has recorded for the Glossa, Naïve, and Fryderyk Chopin Institute labels. On the latter, the group released a recording of the opera Halka by Stanisław Moniuszko in 2019. Europa Galante returned in the 2021-2022 season with touring productions of Monteverdi's Orfeo, a Haydn program, and Vivaldi's Argippo (a recording of which the group issued in 2020). In 2022, Europa Galante released the album Opera in Musica, featuring string quartets by Carlo Monza. ~ Joseph Stevenson & Keith Finke