Clare Norburn

SOPRANO

Clare Norburn is a singer, playwright and producer. She read music at Leeds University and singing at London College of Music. As a playwright, she has developed a new genre of concertplays including Beethoven’s Quartet Journey (six concertplays to accompany a full cycle of his string quartets) for the Dante Quartet (2016), Purcell, the Musical (2018) for Ceruleo; and with director Nicholas Renton, Breaking the Rules (2015) for the Marian Consort, Creating Carmen (2019) for CarmenCo and Galileo (2020) for the Monteverdi String Band and the Marian Consort. With her medieval group The Telling, her Empowered Women trilogy has had 22 performances and two of the concertplays were filmed during lockdown with one being selected by The Guardian as an online classical highlight alongside the Salzburg and Edinburgh Festivals. More recently, Love in the Lockdown (2021), is an online play with music in nine episodes, starring Alec Newman and Rachael Stirling and I, Spie (2021) starring Dominic Marsh, Danny Webb and Alice Imelda has pushed the concertplay format with a kind of Spooks meets Blackadder with music-theatre 16th Century style. Her productions have toured UK festivals and venues including LSO St Luke’s, Bridgewater Hall and St John’s Smith Square.

As a singer, Clare has sung as a soloist with many medieval ensembles including her own group The Telling and back in the 00s, Mediva (finalists in the York International Young Artists Competition and selected for Southbank Centre’s Fresh Young Artists Series) and Vox Animae, with whom she has recorded and performed medieval abbess, Hildegard of Bingen’s music drama Ordo virtutum. With these ensembles she has performed at The Purcell Room, Bridgewater Hall and at leading festivals including Spitalfields Music, Brighton Festival, Newbury Spring Festival and Buxton International Festival. Together with Deborah Roberts, Clare co-founded Brighton Early Music Festival. She stepped down in 2017 after 15 years, to concentrate on writing and singing. She is Artistic Director of Stroud Green Festival, North London’s quirkiest acoustic music festival. She has trained and mentored young ensembles/companies for RADA, Handel House, the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. She also works as a freelance arts fundraiser.