Paul Agnew, British tenor and conductor has made his mark on all the main international stages as a specialist in the music of the 17th and 18th centuries and as the performer of choice for the high-tenor roles of the French Baroque. He is Music Director of Orchestre Français des Jeunes Baroque, he co-director, along with William Christie, of the prestigious academy for young singers, Le Jardin des Voix and Associate Conductor for Les Arts Florissants.
After studying at Magdalen College, Oxford, he met William Christie in 1992 and became a close collaborator of the conductor and his ensemble Les Arts Florissants, while continuing to perform with such other conductors as Marc Minkowski, Ton Koopman, Paul McCreesh, Jean-Claude Malgoire, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Philippe Herreweghe and Emmanuelle Haïm. Current operatic roles include, among others, Orfeo in Monteverdi's Orfeo in Toronto, Telemaco in Monteverdi's Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria, Rameau's Platee and Les Indes Galantes with the Opera de Paris, Handel´s Theodora and Monteverdi's Combattimento.
In 2007, Paul Agnew's career took a new turn when he began conducting certain projects for Les Arts Florissants and has since combined his conducting and singing careers. From 2011 to 2015, he undertook a complete cycle of Monteverdi’s madrigals, a project for which he directed nearly 100 concerts throughout Europe and made three recordings for harmonia mundi the first of which won the Gramophone Award in 2016. He has conducted Les Arts Florissants in such productions as the ballet Doux Mensonges (Opéra de Paris), a new production of Rameau’s Platée (Theater an der Wien, Paris’s Opéra Comique and New York’s Lincoln Center), and created a new production of L’Orfeo as part of the celebration of Claudio Monteverdi’s 450th anniversary – not to mention many concert programs. As a guest conductor, Paul Agnew regularly conducts orchestras such as the Staatsphilharmonie Nürnberg, the Staatskapelle, Dresden, the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, the Houston Symphony Orchestra, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Akademie fur Alte Musik Berlin. Recent highlights also include a new production of Platée staged by Rolando Villazon at the Semperoper Dresden, and a new reading of Gesualdo’s six books of madrigals with Les Arts Florissants also recorded by Harmonia Mundi, the first volume of which won the Gramophone Award in 2020.