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Soprano Mary Bevan is among the most versatile figures on the British operatic scene, with a repertory stretching from Monteverdi to contemporary premieres. She has a bent toward comic opera and has appeared several times in operettas by Gilbert & Sullivan.

Bevan was born in Hertford in southeast England in 1985 into a musical family: her siblings Sophie Bevan and Benjamin Bevan are both successful vocal soloists, and their father, David Bevan, was a conductor. Mary attended Trinity College, Cambridge, studying Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic literature. She took singing courses at Cambridge and then, in a common pattern, went on to the Royal Academy of Music, where she studied with Lillian Watson and Audrey Hyland. Bevan has appeared at Covent Garden, the English National Opera, and the Opera de Monte Carlo, among others. She is a winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society's Young Artist Award. Her roles have included Arpago in Vivaldi’s L'Incoronazione di Dario for England's Garsington Opera; Pamina and Papagena in Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Palestinian Mozart Festival and British Youth Opera, respectively; and Rebecca in the world premiere of Nico Muhly's Two Boys in 2011. Unusually among top-flight operatic sopranos, she has appeared as Yum-Yum in Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado. Bevan is also in demand as a soloist in concert music, having appeared with such groups as the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the English Concert, with which she toured Asia.

Bevan has recorded for the Signum Classics, Delphian, and Champs Hill labels, among others. She made her recording debut in 2012 on Stone Records, with an installment in a cycle of songs by Hugo Wolf, and her recording schedule in the late 2010s and early 2020s has been vigorous. In 2020, she was heard on a pair of albums: The Divine Muse, a recital of songs by Haydn, Schubert, and Wolf, and a multi-artist album of songs by Ian Venables, Love Lives Beyond the Tomb. ~ James Manheim

Baritone Ashley Riches landed places in several of Britain's most prominent programs for emerging artists and appeared at major opera houses in Britain and beyond quite early in his career.

Riches was born in 1986 or 1987 and grew up in Scarborough in North Yorkshire, where he attended the Scarborough College secondary school. As a student there, he played the flute and was inspired by his grandfather Charles Riches, a longtime jazz bandleader at Scarborough's Olympia Ballroom. Ashley went on to Winchester College and then to King's College, Cambridge, where he sang in the King's College Choir and took voice lessons. His main field of study was English, however, and he looked toward a career as a lawyer. He had already lined up an entry-level job at a London firm when his singing teacher suggested that he continue his music studies instead. Riches auditioned and was accepted at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He graduated as a finalist for the school's gold medal. Riches served a major apprenticeship at the Royal Opera House in London as a Jette Parker Young Artist from 2012 to 2014, and he snared attention at a gala concert when he sang a duet with tenor Roberto Alagna. Another boost to his career was a designation as a BBC New Generation Artist from 2016 to 2018. Riches has sung with major companies, including the English National Opera (where he played Count Almaviva in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro), the Opéra Nationale de Lorraine in France, and Moscow's Novaya Opera. He made his debut at the BBC Proms in 2019 with an appearance as Bernardino in Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini. Riches is also active as a concert artist, performing in Handel's Messiah at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, under his former King's College Choir director, Stephen Cleobury, Verdi's Requiem at both Royal Albert Hall and Winchester Cathedral, and Bach's St. Matthew Passion on tour in Europe with the Monteverdi Choir and its director, John Eliot Gardiner, among other works. Riches performed in the British premiere of Shostakovich's unfinished opera Orango under conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen with the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Riches has appeared on various operatic recordings and made his solo debut in 2015 with a world premiere, that of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco's Shakespeare Sonnets, on the Resonus Classics label. Two years later, he moved to Chandos for a recording of songs by Arthur Sullivan. Riches returned in 2021 with A Musical Zoo, a recital of songs about animals. ~ James Manheim

The pianist David Owen Norris has been active in an unusually wide variety of fields; as a pianist he has played concertos and solo recitals, and accompanied singers, and he is conversant with historical keyboard instruments. Norris is also a noted composer and educator, and he is a familiar figure on British radio and television as both a presenter and a guest.

Norris was born in 1953 in Long Buckby in Britain's Northamptonshire County. He attended Keble College at Oxford University as an organ scholar (a student employed as an assistant organist). After graduating from Oxford he studied composition, supporting himself as a rehearsal pianist at the Royal Opera House. He maintained his piano studies and early in his career served as an accompanist, working with a variety of top-level performers including soprano Dame Janet Baker and tenor Peter Pears. Norris scored a major breakthrough as a soloist when he won the inaugural Gilmore Artist Award at the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1991. Since then, Norris has achieved notable success in the U.S., appearing with the Chicago and Detroit Symphony Orchestras among top ensembles. Norris' solo recitals have taken him around the world, with music of Brahms, Schubert, and Poulenc often featured. Norris has also played his own music; his output includes a piano concerto as well as a symphony, an oratorio, and two operas. He has made multiple appearances on the BBC2 television network, beginning in 1990 with the program The Real Thing?: Questions of Authenticity. Norris remains one of the few pianists equally active on a modern piano and on historical keyboard instruments. He has played very early piano concertos written in London around 1770 on a small square fortepiano of the era and, in 1984, made one of this first historically oriented recordings, with David Wilson-Johnson, of Schubert's song cycle Die Winterreise, D. 911. Norris' large recording catalog includes albums on Chandos, Hyperion, and many smaller labels. In 2019 he was heard on Hyperion's The Jupiter Project, a recording of keyboard arrangements of orchestral works by Mozart.

Norris is Professor of Musical Performance at the University of Southampton and has also taught at the Royal College of Music and the Royal Northern College of Music. ~ James Manheim