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British soprano Katherine Watson has been a rising figure on the British early music scene, working with several of the top conductors in the field. She has also amassed a choice résumé of performances of music of the 19th and 20th centuries. Watson attended Trinity College, Cambridge as a choral scholar, where she also took courses in Anglo-Saxon culture, and graduated in 2008. As an undergraduate she was already taking solos in choral works and performing with the Charpentier Consort, the Cambridge Clerkes, and the Cambridge University Baroque Ensemble. The following year her choice of career was set when she was admitted to the Baroque music training academy Le Jardin des Voix, operated by veteran Americo-French conductor William Christie. That led to an appearance in Purcell's The Fairy Queen at the 2012 Glyndebourne Festival, and she got more attention when she won the festival's John Christie Award. In 2015 Watson began to find bookings beyond Britain, appearing at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in the title role in Handel's Theodora, and returning to that theater two years later in the role of Giunone in Monteverdi's Il ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria. She made her debut at the BBC Proms in 2016 and has returned several times. Meanwhile, she was becoming more familiar to the British public through high-profile choral appearances including broadcasts of Handel's Messiah, HWV 56, and Bach's Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248, on the BBC Radio 3 network. She also performed Mozart's solo motet Exsultate, jubilate, K. 165, at Westminster Abbey, and her repertory extends as far forward as Mahler and Lutoslawski. Especially noteworthy is the wide range of early music conductors with whom Watson has worked. These include, in addition to Christie, Stephen Cleobury, Nicholas Kraemer, Stephen Layton, Jonathan Cohen, Paul Agnew, Emmanuelle Haim (with whom she toured East Asia in a program of Rameau arias), Harry Bicket, Roger Norrington, Laurence Cummings, and Philip Pickett. Watson has been a featured soloist on recordings of the Christmas Oratorio and other major choral works, and in 2019 she appeared on the pastiche recording L'Opéra des Opéras on the Alpha label. ~ James Manheim