For an artist to notch up 100 recordings in these far from profligate times is quite an achievement, but more pertinent than the quantity is the quality that the artist must possess to be so in demand. Our 2024 Artist of the Year, the soprano Carolyn Sampson, has that special distinction – she is a true artist, one who marries a beautiful voice, innate musicality and an appreciation of style that has allowed her to sing a vast range of different music.

While many people associate her with Baroque repertoire, she’s as comfortable bringing to life a Canteloube song of the Auvergne (where the challenges also include grappling with the Occitan language – ‘This is feel-good music and Sampson makes us feel good listening to it,’ wrote Gramophone’s David Patrick Stearns), or the Requiem by Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, very much in the late-Victorian choral tradition, or one of those fiendish solo parts in Mahler’s Eighth Symphony which she recorded with Osmo Vänskä (‘Sampson and the second soprano Jacquelyn Wagner whack out their top Bs and Cs with fabulous accuracy crowning each successive climax,’ marvelled Edward Seckerson in January), or indeed music from earlier times, as in her delightful ‘You did not want for joy’, a programme for which she was joined by the lutenist Matthew Wadsworth and which includes songs by Dowland, Campion and Purcell, juxtaposed with more modern fare by Britten and Nico Muhly. The key to her success in so much of this music is her very natural way with words and her ability to communicate with a disarming directness.

Robert von Bahr, the founder of BIS – for whom a large number of those 100 recordings were made – remembers listening to a first edit of an album of Bach secular cantatas performed by Bach Collegium Japan and Masaaki Suzuki, and, not knowing who the singer was, rang the producer at 1am to find out because, in his excitement at encountering such a voice, he couldn’t wait till morning. Hers is the sort of artistry that compels such attention and devotion, and numerous glorious collaborations with BCJ ensued (including the 2017 Gramophone Award-winning Mozart C minor Mass, in which she touches the sublime).

BIS has also been the home to the bulk of her song programmes, invariably made with the supremely sympathetic Joseph Middleton as pianist. The latest, Album No 100, ‘But I like to sing …’ (the title is the riposte to ‘I hate music’ in Bernstein’s cycle) is a typically clever collection of songs that have meant a lot to her as an artist, but this one is particularly suffused with joy. No surprise then that she includes Parry’s ‘My heart is like a singing bird’ as well as every musician’s credo, Schubert’s heavenly ‘An die Musik’.

Incredibly hard working, always completely engaged with the music in hand, effortlessly delightful and professional to her fingertips, Carolyn Sampson is a worthy Artist of the Year and, particularly important for us at Gramophone, someone who has cherished the art of making recordings. Long may she continue. James Jolly

The Recording

‘But I like to sing …’

Carolyn Sampson sop Joseph Middleton pf

BIS (12/23)

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