Hyperion Records

John Potter’s musical collaborators include the composer Ambrose Field, video artist Michael Lynch and the lutenist Ariel Abramovich, as well as The Dowland Project, Red Byrd and the Gavin Bryars Ensemble. He is a member of the German ensemble The Sound & The Fury. A writer and scholar as well as a singer, he has published four books on singing and is a former British Library Edison Fellow. He is Reader Emeritus in Music at the University of York.

John’s eclectic performing experience has ranged from first performances of works by Berio, Stockhausen, James Dillon and Michael Finnissy to backing vocals for Manfred Mann, Mike Oldfield and The Who (among others). Red Byrd, the group he founded with bass Richard Wistreich, has recorded music as diverse as Monteverdi (both ‘straight’ and with electric guitars), Léonin (two recordings for Hyperion) and the Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones. He was a major contributor to The Hilliard Ensemble’s ‘Officium’ project (for which he has five gold discs), and subsequently developed many of the ideas in The Dowland Project’s four albums for ECM; he also produced the first three ECM albums by the Scandinavian Trio Mediaeval. Current projects include multimedia presentations of music by Ambrose Field (Being Dufay and its successor, both with films by Michael Lynch) and the Conductus project (three albums for Hyperion, with associated live performances and films by Michael Lynch). His lute song repertoire ranges from Thomas Ford to Benedetto Ferrari, and includes programmes of Dowland and Campion. He also works with vihuela on the 15th- and 16th-century ‘intabulation’ repertory, and with chitarrone on later music by Blow, Purcell and others.