Biography

In August 2024, Charles will be joining the Yale School of Music to study on the opera programme with internationally acclaimed voice teacher Gerald Martin Moore. Current engagements include understudying the First Armed Man in Die Zauberflöte for Glyndebourne Festival Opera.​

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Admired for his ‘vocal excellence' (Opera News), ‘gleaming top notes, a warm middle register and considerable dramatic insight’ (The Guardian), British tenor Charles Styles made his critically acclaimed London debut in March 2023, replacing Stuart Skelton at short notice in the world premiere of Iain Bell’s Beowulf with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Martyn Brabbins at the Barbican. Beowulf was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 18 April.

 

Born in Tamworth, Styles originally intended to become an academic. After scholarships to Eton and Oxford, he decided upon a singing career, following the encouragement of the conductor Christian Thielemann in 2017. Originally preferring private study to a conservatoire, he has been a pupil of tenor Brian Smith Walters since 2018. Styles graduated top of his faculty from Oxford with an MPhil in Philosophical Theology as a Clarendon Scholar in 2021. He made his professional operatic debut in 2022 as a member of the Glyndebourne Chorus, first for Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers, then later for the Autumn tour: he returned to Glyndebourne in 2023 for Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, directed by Barrie Kosky.

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Charles has been selected to participate in masterclasses with Edith Wiens and Tobias Truniger as part of the International Meistersinger Akademie in Neumarkt, Germany, as well as with Ramón Vargas and Dolora Zajick as part of the Debrecen Festival in Hungary, culminating in a performance at the Nagyerdei Open Air Theater. In 2023, Charles made his debut as Alfredo in La Traviata, directed by Ruth Knight, and as Idomeneo, with Brunswick Vocal Arts, conducted by Gary Matthewman.