Deborah Roberts BEM
10 May 1952 –
9 September 2024

We are very sad to announce the death of BREMF’s Artistic Director Deborah Roberts BEM. It was a huge privilege to work alongside Deborah, and her creativity has shaped the Festival into what it is today.

Deborah Roberts, co-founder of Brighton Early Music Festival, co-founder of Musica  Secreta and a member of the Tallis Scholars for over 20 years, died on 9 September 2024.

Deborah’s love of early music began with hearing it on the radio, and to quote her interview with Sussex Life in November 2019: “I was probably around 14 years old when I first heard some renaissance music on the radio. There was something about the whole style and the way the cadences worked that immediately appealed. From then on I was mildly obsessed with finding out more …..I even started a small group at my school to start trying to sing some of the music, mostly madrigals, that I arranged for us.”

Inspired in this way, Deborah graduated from Nottingham University with an MA in editing and interpreting renaissance and baroque music, studying with David Munrow, whose encouragement she gratefully acknowledged. She remained fascinated by the discovery of new repertoire and performance styles.

As a long-term former member of The Tallis Scholars, Deborah performed with them in over 1,200 concerts and in countless recordings. She also sang with many other early music ensembles as a soloist and consort singer.

She founded the female voice ensemble, Musica Secreta in the early 1990s, to champion music by women composers of the 15^th to 17^th centuries, much of it discovered in original sources by her collaborator, musicologist Laurie Stras.

She took up choral direction more than 20 years ago and was very active running courses in the performance of polyphonic vocal music and early opera.

In 2002 Deborah co-founded Brighton Early Music Festival with Clare Norburn, and the Festival has grown since then under her leadership into one of the most influential platforms for early music in the UK. An integral part of what Deborah brought to the Festival is the BREMF Live scheme, which led to the creation and mentorship of countless young artists and ensembles at the start of their early music career. She also founded and directed the Festival’s vocal consort (BREMF Consort of Voices), and with them gave many exciting and dramatic performances of renaissance and early baroque repertoire.

She brought her detailed knowledge of contemporary performance practice to early opera productions working on specialist technical and ensemble skills, including creating outstanding performances of several early operatic works including Francesca Caccini’s La liberazione di Ruggiero, to great acclaim for the Festival.

She encapsulated the Festival and her vision for it by saying: “BREMF is a very special festival and one that from the very start was intended to be more than just a collection of concerts. Our main aim is to make a realistic and relevant context for the music we present. This can often mean involving other art forms; even to the point of including contemporary and community arts with music written hundreds of years ago that was never intended for performance in concerts.”

The Festival will be remembering Deborah with a memorial event at a later date.

Deborah has asked for donations to BREMF to be made in her memory, to be used to carry on the projects about which she was most passionate. You can click here to make a donation in memory of Deborah.