Mhairi Lawson has performed in opera houses and concert halls worldwide. In the UK, she has regularly collaborated with such companies as The Gabrieli Consort & Players, The Academy of Ancient Music, English National Opera, The Early Opera Company and The Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and with many leading conductors such as William Christie, Sir Charles Mackerras, Paul McCreesh, Jane Glover and Sir John Eliot Gardiner, in repertoire ranging from traditional folksong to opera.

This season, Mhairi sings Purcell’s King Arthur with the Early Opera Company in London, Bach’s B minor Mass with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Mozart’s Requiem with the Royal Northern Sinfonia, and returns to the Academy of Ancient Music.

Recent highlights include performances of Handel’s Messiah with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and also the Dunedin Consort, Haydn’s Creation with the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra and also the Arctic Philharmonic, Bach’s St Matthew Passion with Nieuwe Philharmonie Utrecht and also BBC NOW, regular residencies at the Carmel Bach Festival in the USA, and performances of Purcell’s King Arthur on tour with the Gabrieli Consort.

With Les Arts Florissants, Mhairi has performed dramatic music by Purcell, Charpentier, Landi and Monteverdi at the Cité de la Musique, Paris, throughout Europe, and London’s Barbican Centre and Birmingham’s Symphony Hall in the UK.

Further afield, Mhairi has sung Bach’s St John Passion in New York’s Lincoln Centre, and in Weimar, Germany, the St Matthew Passion with the St Paul Chamber Orchestra, and King Arthur with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, San Francisco.

She has made many commercial recordings, including Haydn’s Creation with the Choir of New College, Oxford, conducted by Edward Higginbottom, Scottish Jacobite Songs on the Avison Ensemble’s CD Rebellion, and two discs of Schubert Lieder, including the vocal tour de force Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, with clarinettist Jane Booth and pianist Eugene Asti. Mhairi also features on Les Arts Florissants’ 2017 release of Monteverdi Madrigals vol. 3 ‘Venezia’ for Harmonia Mundi, a finalist for the Gramophone Baroque Vocal Award.

With the virtuoso baroque band La Serenissima, Mhairi has recorded many of Vivaldi’s sacred and operatic works and has performed large-scale pieces including La senna festeggiante and La fida ninfa in Venice.

A keen recitalist, engagements have included songs from the British folksong tradition and Lieder by Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Strauss and Wolf with appearances in the Edinburgh Festival, Newcastle and York Universities, recordings for BBC Radio 3, and a recital with lutenist Elizabeth Kenny as part of the St Magnus International Festival.

Whilst still a student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Mhairi won the International Early Music Network Young Artists Prize with the fortepianist Olga Tverskaya, which led to her first CD recording of Haydn’s English and Scottish Songs.

See Mhairi Lawson perform Mozart’s Requiem with the RSNO on 25 and 26 April 2025.