Will Prior, countertenor

Will is a London-based countertenor, currently studying a Master’s in Vocal Performance at the Royal College of Music as an ABRSM scholar. Will is also grateful to be supported by The Drake Calleja Trust, The Josephine Baker Trust, The William Gibbs Educational Trust, and by the Countess of Munster Musical Trust who, in 2024, awarded him the inaugural Dame Janet Baker Award for most promising singer at audition. Will is a Britten Pears Young Artist 2025-26 as a recipient of the Chandos Bursary from the Chandos Memorial Trust. Next year, he will begin as a member of the Munster Recital Scheme. He studies with Veronica Veysey-Campbell and Caroline Dowdle. 

Will is preparing for a career as a soloist and has begun performing internationally. He has sung in masterclasses with Edith Wiens, Sir Thomas Allen, Carolyn Sampson, and Jeremy Huw Williams and appeared as alto soloist in concert with a number groups. In June 2025, he sang the principle role of Piero Della Francesca in the RCM Summer production: Jonathan Dove’s opera Seven Angels, directed by Sir Thomas Allen. As well as loving stage work, Will has a passion for song and devising creative recital programmes which push the boundaries of the countertenor repertoire. He recently made his Wigmore Hall debut, singing French songs as part of a concert celebrating the life and work of Mel Bonis.

He has sung Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater with Baroque Orchestra of the Ionian University in Corfu and will return in October 2026 to sing Vivaldi’s Nisi Dominus. In February 2025, Will sang as a soloist with the RCM Baroque Orchestra in a performance of J.S. Bach’s Tönet, ihr Pauken! Erschallet, Trompeten! BWV 214. Will has also appeared as a soloist with Ealing Chorale, performing Giles Swayne’s Missa Tiburtina, and the UK Japan Choir with whom he sang the alto solos in Bach’s St John Passion; he will return in December 2025 to sing the alto solos in Handel’s Messiah with the UK Japan choir.  

Before moving to London, Will studied music at Magdalen College Oxford; he sang as an Academical Clerk in Magdalen College Choir and graduated with a first-class degree in 2021. After finishing his undergraduate studies, Will stayed on in Oxford for two years, spending the first of these as the Waynflete Academic in music at Magdalen College School and the second as a Lay Clerk at Christ Church Cathedral. During this time, Will studied singing with Carys Land and Billy Purefoy and sang with a variety of ensembles including: The Gesualdo Six, VOCES8 and VOCES8 Scholars, The Oxford Bach Soloists, Mogens Dahl Kammerkor, and recently established vocal consort: The Selene Scholars. He also co-directed The Oxford Gargoyles, a jazz acapella group, as an undergraduate and spent two happy years directing Oxford Harmony, an amateur barbershop chorus.