In 2002, Deborah Roberts, who has died aged 72 of breast cancer, and her fellow soprano Clare Norburn cajoled some friends into joining them for a series of six concerts in Brighton churches. For the previous quarter century, Deborah had toured the world and made dozens of recordings of Renaissance sacred vocal music as a leading light of the Tallis Scholars. Now she wanted to make music in a particular place and community, and so co-founded the Brighton Early Music Festival (BREMF).
Deborah’s prodigious energy brought forth startling combinations: using circus skills – including aerial dancers – to grace a performance of a wedding spectacular, the 1589 Florentine Intermedi (2012); marching small children dressed as sea creatures around a church, recreating a medieval Feast of Fools (2019); illustrating James Lovelock’s Gaia theory with a blend of voices, kora, sitar, harpsichord and viol in The Whipering Dome, a new work by Jeremy Avis (2020); and merging Francesca Caccini’s La Liberazione di Ruggiero, from 1625, the first known opera by a female composer, with visuals inspired by the early 20th-century cinema illusionist Georges Méliès (2022).
She deployed humour, enthusiasm and determination to replace traditional concert formats with more engaging presentations, such as delighting pub audiences with jam sessions that allowed young classical and jazz players to improvise together. Often she had her choirs imitating meerkats and the aliens from Galaxy Quest in an attempt to produce her desired sound.
Soon after its informal start, the festival was on a more solid footing, with trustees, professional production support, and a band of devoted volunteers. It built from the grassroots and fostered British talent. From 2007, the BREMF Live scheme gave new artists a platform and mentoring, and its graduate trainee scheme provided aspiring arts administrators with hands-on experience, all with a view to supporting a sustainable UK early music scene not wholly reliant on big-ticket, international groups.
To provide more opportunities for collaboration with professional artists, Deborah created new ensembles : the BREMF Consort of Voices, a select mixed-voice chamber choir; Celestial Sirens, an upper-voice choir exploring the rich repertoire of convent polyphony; the BREMF Community Choir; and the BREMF Players, a baroque orchestra led by Alison Bury.
The festival’s programming reflected Deborah’s musical outlook: she wanted to broaden the definition of early music, a term that she did not like, and brought in musics from around the world – for instance from Azerbaijan and from northern India – while bridging the genre gaps between traditional, folk, early, classical and popular music.
Born in Croydon, Deborah was one of four children of Mollie Weaver and Edwin Roberts, a teacher of modern languages. From Lady Edridge girls high school in Croydon she went on to take an arts degree at Leicester University. There she studied with David Munrow, whose Early Music Consort of London was doing much to revolutionise British attitudes to music from before 1600. She received a master’s degree in Renaissance and Baroque music from Nottingham University in 1975.
As a choral and consort singer she performed chant and polyphony in the choir at Brompton Oratory, near Knightsbridge in central London, and in the ensemble Scuola di Chiesa, run by its choirmaster, John Hoban. She sang with many ensembles specialising in the music of the 15th to 18th centuries, most consistently from 1977 with the Tallis Scholars, directed by Peter Phillips. By the early 1980s, she and her fellow sopranos Tessa Bonner, Sally Dunkley and Ruth Holton, with the alto Caroline Trevor, had created a distinctive sound for women’s voices in mixed-voice early music ensembles; striking solo moments sometimes came, as with Deborah’s embellishiments of Allegri’s Miserere, notably in a 2007 recording.
However, by the mid-80s, she was already experimenting with recreating the music of early modern women: this led to her forming the female-voice ensemble Musica Secreta with the harpsichordist John Toll. Under her direction, Musica Secreta went on to make nine recordings of early music written for and by women. I joined her as co-director in 1999, and our curiosity and love of discovery cemented a close friendship. The group had taken its name from the performances by female singers for the Duke of Ferrara in the late 16th century, which we took as the basis for the CD Dangerous Graces (2002). For the disc Lucrezia Borgia’s Daughter (2016) we unearthed anonymous motets now attributed to Suor Leonora d’Este.
Deborah gave her final concert as a singer with Musica Secreta at BREMF in 2019. The community aspect of her work was recognised by the award of a British Empire Medal in 2024.
A great lover of Italy, for more than a decade Deborah made the Ligurian mountain town of Triora her second home. Every summer for a decade from 2009 she held courses for students from all over the world, and involved the local community with free concerts in the church or open-air operas in the town square.
In 1981 Deborah married the composer James Erber, and they had a son, Joseph, who is a pianist and composer. The marriage ended in divorce, and she is survived by her partner, Maurice Shipsey, Joseph, and her siblings Tony, Edwina and Dinah.