Musical Director of An-die-Musik

Biographie auf Deutsch

Nicholas Cadog Doig (born 1993) is a British tenor, pianist, organist and composer. Since 2023 he has performed 33 Liederabende (song recitals) in North Germany. He has appeared in opera and opera galas in the UK, Germany, Hungary and Portugal. He has received many awards and prizes, including the Cambridge University Prize for highest mark in Final Recital (for a vocal recital). As part of Magdalen College Choir (Oxford), he received a Nomination for a Grammy Award (Best Small Ensemble), and was part of an album that won Album of the Year at the Classical BRIT Awards in 2007 (Paul McCartney's Ecce Cor Meum). He is a passionate composer having composed well over eight hours of music (see below). He published his Opus 1 (a 25-minute song cycle) with his own imprint Osterdeich Verlag in January 2024. His Opus 2, Four Sacred Pieces, will be published in the summer of 2025. Not only a classical singer, he sings covers of Elvis Presley, The Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers.

He has sung chamber recitals in the UK in Cambridge (for example the Master’s Lodge, Trinity Hall), Chard, Colchester, London (St John’s Notting Hill), Oxford (including in the Cathedral), and Rugby, Sanford-on-Thames and Wantage. In Germany he has sung more than 20 recitals in Bremen, and also in Delmenhorst, Freiburg im Breisgau, Kirchwalsede, Neumünster, Travermünde and Vegesack. As part of chamber choirs he has recorded 10 CDs with Delphian, EMI, The Gift of Music, Harmonia Mundi and Signum, and has sung at the BBC Proms, Charles Burney Festival (Kings Lynn), Dorchester Festival, Festival Berlioz (La Côte-Saint-André), Spitafields Festival (London) and St Albans International Festival, and appeared as a soloist at the Petworth Festival with conductor David Hill.

His repertoire for his Lieder recitals consists mainly of songs by Schubert, Clara and Robert Schumann, and his own songs and arrangements. A lover of the two great songs cycles of Schubert, he has performed Die schöne Müllerin twice and Winterreise five times. He was invited to perform an evening song recital of Schubert songs for the members of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, as part of a project focusing on orchestral arrangements of Schubert’s songs (this orchestra was awarded 'Orchestra of the year 2023' by Gramophone magazine). He has also sung Schubert Lieder liturgically including half a dozen in Bremen Cathedral.

He founded An-die-Musik in 2022, to bring more live music to his parish of St. Marien, Bremen, and to support local and international good causes. In 2024 An-die-Musik branched out to include eight locations in Bremen-Ost, Bremen-Nord, and Bremen-Neustadt. These concerts have included a great diversity of music, from Pop music from Brazil and Bangladesch, to contemporary music from Japan and Great Britain. The 2023 series was sponsored by Die Sparkasse Bremen (a leading German bank). These concerts have raised nearly €3000 for charitable organisations.

He studied singing for five years at the Hochschule für Künste, Bremen, graduating with a Masters in 2022. Between 2018 and 2021 he was repetiteur for the conservatoire, accompanying over 300 hours of singing lessons and opera rehearsals. Between 2017 and 2024 he studied with Prof. Krisztina Laki. Between 2017 and 2020 he also studied with the Wagnerian tenor Prof. Thomas Mohr at the conservatoire. Only after years of successful treatment for Bipolar disorder, and then a lasting and complete convalescence in 2022, was he able to finish his development as a singer.

Opera credits include: Enrico/L’isola disabitata (Haydn), Borya/Cheryomushki (Schostakovich), Basilio/Le Nozze di Figaro (Mozart) and Spoletta/Tosca (Puccini). A particular highlight was singing John Tavener’s Mary of Egypt in the role of Zossima, the main protagonist opposite the eponymous Mary, in a production directed by the composer’s daughter, Theodora Tavener, and staged for three performances in the iconic King’s Chapel in Cambridge. The production was coached by members of the original cast.

He has sung arias in Opera-Galas with orchestra, notably in Queen’s College Cambridge, and in the former capital of the Azores (Portugal), Villa Franco do Campo. With piano he has sung operatic evenings in prestigious venues such as the Royal Academy of Music, London, and at the Festetics Palace (Keszthely), Hungary. In opera chorus he sang Il Barbier di Siviglia (Rossini), La Traviata und Rigoletto (Verdi) in the Bremen Musikfest and Rigoletto at the Festival Berlioz in France (Château de La Côte-Saint-André). He has performed solo in oratorio in prestigious locations including Handel's Messiah at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, and Rossini's Petite Messe Solennelle at the Schloß Thedinghausen.

A prolific composer, Doig has composed 127 songs in English, French, German and Portuguese, in neo-Classical, neo-Romantic and neo-Modern styles. His six song cycles include Above, Below (2011) 60 Epigramme nach Daniel Czepko (2019-2020) and a 2022 completion of Schubert’s Abendröte cycle (11 Schubert Lieder and 11 Doig Lieder). He was inspired to learn German having fallen in love with the Schubert’s settings of the great Romantic poets. He has already written several songs to the poems not only of Friedrich Schlegel (11) and Heinrich Heine (5), but also Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2) and the Scottish bard Robert Burns (4). He composed and wrote the libretto (in English) of the children’s opera Rapunzel in 2020 (which was performed during the pandemic by members of his family).

In addition he has composed sonatas for flute, oboe, organ, piano and violin, suites for cello, flute and piano, as well as four pieces for string quartet, 20 fugues, a dozen sacred pieces for choir, and an Unfinished Symphony. His compositions have been performed in many different places, for example: Haus der Wissenschaft, Bremen, and Downing College Hall, Cambridge. In 2024 he published his Opus 1 Dichterliebe: Heine, Brecht, Kaléko with his own imprint Osterdeich Verlag, which was first performed in the Unser Lieben Frauen Kirche in central Bremen.

Doig was born in Oxford, where he began his musical life singing in Magdalen College Choir, Oxford, singing on the CD 'Orlando Gibbons: With a Merrie Noyse – Second Service and Consort Anthems', which was nominated for a Grammy Award (Best Small Ensemble). He was Head Chorister when he and other selected choristers of Magdalen College (Oxford) and King’s College (Cambridge) recorded Paul McCartney’s oratorio Ecce Cor Meum at Abbey Road, with London Voices and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, conducted by Gavin Greenaway. This recording went on to win a Classical BRIT Award. He studied Voice, Piano and Organ at the Junior Royal Academy of Music in London 2007-2012.

Later he studied Performance, Composition and Music History at the University of Cambridge 2012-2015. He was taught contemporary composition at Cambridge by composers Prof. Robin Holloway and Prof. Giles Swayne, and tonal composition by conductors Finnegan Downie Dear and Geoffrey Webber. He studied voice with Prof. Patricia Rosario OBE 2013-2017. With Prof. Edoardo Bellotti he studied Early Music Organ, Harpsichord, Basso Continuo and Improvisation at the Bremen Conservatoire from 2021 to 2022.

With Caius Choir, Cambridge, he sang in many great concert venues such as the Royal Albert Hall (for Verdi's Requiem), Auditorio de Zaragoza (Fauré’s Requiem), and the Basilica of the Mosteiro de São Bento, São Paulo (Brazilian choral music). With l’Orchestre national de Bordeaux Aquitaine, the Choir sang two sellout performances of Bach’s Matthew Passion in the Auditorium of the Opéra National de Bordeaux (a concert hall with seating capacity of 1,500). He sang the aria ‘Say to them that are of a fearful heart’ from Samuel Sebastian Wesley’s The Wilderness live on BBC Radio 3. With the choir he toured the UK, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Hong Kong and China. Whilst studying at Cambridge he visited Burkina Faso, Ghana and France to research ‘asymmetrical metres’. No stranger to the conductor’s baton, he directed the Caius Men 2014-2015 and conducted Scenes from Goethe’s Faust by Robert Schumann for a distinguished audience including Stephen Hawking.

He conducts the Choir of the International English-Speaking Community of St. Johann, the 800-year-old Propsteikirche in central Bremen, for whom he regularly writes new music. As an organist he has held jobs at St Peter and St Paul in Oxford, and at St. Bartholomäus in Kirchwalsede (Lower Saxony). In total he has played services in 17 different churches in Bremen and Lower Saxony, as well as accompanying two concerts of the Unser Lieben Frauen Kirche Boys' Choir. As a pianist he has won prizes including the Oxford Music Festival Romantic Piano Award, and the Oxford Jazz Festival Jazzfactor Award as solo voice and piano of 'The Quaking Ducks'. He is also an experienced singing teacher having taught a 21 students one-to-one. He was a staff member on Eton Choral Courses, teaching vocal ensemble and working as a piano accompanist.

He describes himself as a 'Classical Singer-Songwriter'; he enjoys arranging Pop songs for classical voice, of which his versions of Mariah Carey's 'Without You' the Football Anthem of FC Liverpool 'You’ll never walk alone!' have been met with great enthusiasm.