Having earned an English degree at King’s College, Cambridge, where he was also a choral scholar, the counter-tenor Michael Chance received vocal training from Rupert Bruce Lockhart. He made his operatic debut in Ronald Eyre’s staging of Cavalli’s Giasone at the Buxton Festival, and has subsequently performed in opera houses, concert and recital halls and at international festivals around the world. His wide-ranging repertoire reaches from Elizabethan lute songs to contemporary works composed specifically for him by composers such as Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, Alexander Goehr, Tan Dun, Anthony Powers, Sir John Tavener, Sally Beamish and Elvis Costello. He premiered the roles of Orpheus in The Second Mrs Kong by Sir Harrison Birtwistle and a Military Governor in Night at the Chinese Opera by Judith Weir, both of which were written for him. His discography includes, for Chandos, Elizabethan and Jacobean lute songs, German sacred cantatas, liturgical works by Vivaldi, Buxtehude and J.S. Bach, Tavener’s Fall and Resurrection, and the Voice of Apollo in Britten’s Death in Venice. Michael Chance is a visiting Professor at the Royal College of Music.