Dr. Justin Vickers
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Justin has enjoyed a career as an operatic tenor and a musicologist. He has performed at Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully and Avery Fisher Halls at Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Moscow’s International House of Music, Beijing’s Forbidden City Concert Hall, Shenyang’s Grand Theatre, Albania’s National Opera House, Vienna’s Stephansdom, and the Library of Congress.
Among his commercial recordings is Caledonian Scenes: Songs of Judith Weir, Benjamin Britten, and Hamish MacCunn (Albany Records, 2020); in 2023, his next solo album is released: The Poet’s Echo: Songs of Benjamin Britten, John David Earnest, Colin Matthews, and Thomas Schuttenhelm (Albany Records).
In 2010, Justin sang the world premiere performance of Britten’s ‘Epilogue’ (1943) to The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, a forgotten manuscript that he uncovered in the Britten-Pears Library. He edited and contributed to Benjamin Britten in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and Benjamin Britten Studies: Essays on An Inexplicit Art (The Boydell Press, 2017).
As a 2020-2021 U.S. Fulbright Scholar to the United Kingdom, his primary project was the monograph The Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts: A History of the Britten–Pears Era, 1948–1986 (forthcoming by The Boydell Press). Justin Vickers and Philip Reed are editing the memoir of the Aldeburgh Festival’s first manager, Elizabeth Sweeting alongside some 75 pieces of correspondence with Britten (The Bittern Press, 2023). Justin is also writing about Britten’s stage works for children in Childhood and the Operatic Imaginary since 1900.
Dr. Vickers is Professor of Music and Artist Teacher of Voice at Illinois State University, USA.
“Benjamin Britten is central to my life and work as an artist-scholar. The opportunity to celebrate his childhood represents a unique glimpse into this world-changing composer. How fitting to see Ian Rank-Broadley’s sculpture find its home overlooking the very sea that captivated him as a child and which inspired Britten throughout his life. In that sense, the young Britten invites Lowestoft’s young people to imagine infinite dreams for themselves and their lives.”