His work with the latter ensemble led to lasting friendships with the lutenist Robert Spencer and with Christopher Hogwood, with whom he would go on to make landmark recordings of works including Handel’s Orlando and Athalia, the Stabat maters of Vivaldi and Pergolesi, and Vivaldi’s Nisi dominus.īowman’s career as a soloist began in earnest in 1967, after he auditioned for Benjamin Britten’s English Opera Group the composer invited him to sing at the opening concert of Queen Elizabeth Hall (Bowman’s professional solo debut in London), and later that year he appeared at Aldeburgh and at Sadler’s Wells in a role that he came to redefine: Oberon in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which he went on to sing at many of the world’s major opera-houses and to record for Richard Hickox in 1990. $ īorn in Oxford in 1941, Bowman was educated at the King’s School Ely, where he sang as a treble chorister and found his vocation as a countertenor after deputising for a visiting soloist in Purcell’s Welcome to All the Pleasures he subsequently took up a choral scholarship at New College Oxford (where he read History), and began singing with the Choir of Westminster Abbey and with David Munrow’s Early Music Consort of London not long after graduation.

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