Born in Edinburgh, Henry Herford read Classics and English at Cambridge before training at the Royal Northern College of Music, where he won the Gold Medal for Singing.

His operatic career began at Glyndebourne with the Forester in The Cunning Little Vixen under Simon Rattle, and he has since performed around eighty rôles with opera companies throughout Britain and Europe, including Covent Garden, Glyndebourne and Scottish Opera.

Recordings include Demetrius in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and multiple rôles in Maxwell Davies’s Resurrection (Naxos 8.660359-60), as well as television productions of Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse and Osborne’s The Electrification of the Soviet Union. Other recordings range from from baroque opera to twentieth-century English and American song, including a two-CD set of the songs of Charles Ives which won the Music Retailers’ Record of the Year award.

In oratorio he has sung under leading conductors in Europe, the Americas and Hong Kong, and has twice appeared as soloist at The Last Night of the Proms.

As a recitalist he has won international awards in Britain, Holland and America and has made frequent broadcasts and recordings with the Nash Ensemble, the Songmakers’ Almanac, the Endymion and Koenig Ensembles, Lontano, the Lindsay Quartet and Ensemble Modern.

He teaches at the Royal Northern College of Music and the Birmingham Conservatoire.