Gloria (Missa: gantz Teudsch) - Polyhymnia caduceatrix (1619) -
Tessa Bonner enjoyed a significant career as a classical singer, it fell we… Read Full Bio ↴Tessa Bonner enjoyed a significant career as a classical singer, it fell well outside the usual world of concert hall and opera house. Indeed, it took her along a path that a piano-playing schoolgirl from Hounslow, west London, could scarcely have imagined in the 1960s.
Born in Hammersmith and educated at Isleworth Green school for girls, Tessa started work behind the scenes on such BBC programmes as Blue Peter and Face the Music. Only at the age of 25, after an early marriage, did she decide to study for a degree in music. At Leeds University, with singing lessons from the Deller Consort's Honor Sheppard and exposure to the burgeoning world of early music, she found the perfect outlet for her distinctive musical and vocal personality.
Tessa had a refreshingly clear and exceptionally true voice. Her touchingly unaffected singing first caught my ear when I was visiting Leeds, and I was quick to offer what proved to be her very first professional engagement, with the Taverner Choir, when she returned to London in 1979 for further study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
With the extraordinary surge of activity in exploring renaissance and baroque repertoires - led by the BBC and fed by the record companies - the usual distinctions between solo and choral singing were beginning to break down, and one-to-a-part ensemble singing was becoming commonplace. Tessa was in her element, her musical instincts and ambitions perfectly at one with the voice nature had given her. She had no wish to "progress" to later repertories or to a "bigger" career.
While always relishing solo work, she remained a consummate team-player, an unassuming but vital part of specialist ensembles large and, more often, small, among them the Tallis Scholars, the New London Consort, the Lute Group, the Gabrieli Consort, the King's Consort, Musica Secreta and my own Taverner Consort. As a soloist she contributed to numerous recordings, including Monteverdi's 1610 Vespers with no fewer than three of these groups, as well as the same composer's Orfeo and Il Ballo delle Ingrate (for Philip Pickett), odes by Purcell (for Robert King), sacred music by Purcell (for Philippe Herreweghe), Vivaldi's Gloria and Bach's Magnificat (for Richard Hickox), Bach's St John Passion (for me), and - as First Boy - Mozart's The Magic Flute (for Roger Norrington).
Tessa's musical tastes remained splendidly catholic, encompassing Bessie Smith (her favourite singer), Motown, 1960s girl groups and much more. There was also motherhood, through her second marriage, to Graeme Curry - and the pleasing symmetry of her daughter Laura's choosing to study music (Pop and World) at Leeds.
Touring and recording with the Tallis Scholars became Tessa's bread and butter. In her 25 years with the group she notched up 37 CDs and a staggering 1,100 concerts, the last of them - with what turned out to be a collapsed lung - barely a month before Christmas. Succumbing finally to the last of three unrelated cancers in the space of a single year, she was supported by Laura, by her mother, Margaret Pollard, and by Donald Greig, her partner of many years.
• Tessa (Teresa Margaret) Bonner, soprano, born 28 February 1951; died 31 December 2008
Born in Hammersmith and educated at Isleworth Green school for girls, Tessa started work behind the scenes on such BBC programmes as Blue Peter and Face the Music. Only at the age of 25, after an early marriage, did she decide to study for a degree in music. At Leeds University, with singing lessons from the Deller Consort's Honor Sheppard and exposure to the burgeoning world of early music, she found the perfect outlet for her distinctive musical and vocal personality.
Tessa had a refreshingly clear and exceptionally true voice. Her touchingly unaffected singing first caught my ear when I was visiting Leeds, and I was quick to offer what proved to be her very first professional engagement, with the Taverner Choir, when she returned to London in 1979 for further study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
With the extraordinary surge of activity in exploring renaissance and baroque repertoires - led by the BBC and fed by the record companies - the usual distinctions between solo and choral singing were beginning to break down, and one-to-a-part ensemble singing was becoming commonplace. Tessa was in her element, her musical instincts and ambitions perfectly at one with the voice nature had given her. She had no wish to "progress" to later repertories or to a "bigger" career.
While always relishing solo work, she remained a consummate team-player, an unassuming but vital part of specialist ensembles large and, more often, small, among them the Tallis Scholars, the New London Consort, the Lute Group, the Gabrieli Consort, the King's Consort, Musica Secreta and my own Taverner Consort. As a soloist she contributed to numerous recordings, including Monteverdi's 1610 Vespers with no fewer than three of these groups, as well as the same composer's Orfeo and Il Ballo delle Ingrate (for Philip Pickett), odes by Purcell (for Robert King), sacred music by Purcell (for Philippe Herreweghe), Vivaldi's Gloria and Bach's Magnificat (for Richard Hickox), Bach's St John Passion (for me), and - as First Boy - Mozart's The Magic Flute (for Roger Norrington).
Tessa's musical tastes remained splendidly catholic, encompassing Bessie Smith (her favourite singer), Motown, 1960s girl groups and much more. There was also motherhood, through her second marriage, to Graeme Curry - and the pleasing symmetry of her daughter Laura's choosing to study music (Pop and World) at Leeds.
Touring and recording with the Tallis Scholars became Tessa's bread and butter. In her 25 years with the group she notched up 37 CDs and a staggering 1,100 concerts, the last of them - with what turned out to be a collapsed lung - barely a month before Christmas. Succumbing finally to the last of three unrelated cancers in the space of a single year, she was supported by Laura, by her mother, Margaret Pollard, and by Donald Greig, her partner of many years.
• Tessa (Teresa Margaret) Bonner, soprano, born 28 February 1951; died 31 December 2008
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Gloria
Tessa Bonner Lyrics
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