Deborah Roberts BEM
10 May 1952 –
9 September 2024

Deborah Roberts, co-founder and Artistic Director 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. It was a huge privilege to work alongside Deborah, and her creativity has shaped the Festival into what it is today.

Deborah has asked for donations to be made to BREMF in her memory, and we will use these to continue the Festival that she loved and to carry on the unique projects that she championed and developed.
Click here if you would like to make a donation in memory of Deborah.

You can also read an obituary of Deborah in The Guardian, in The Argus and The Latest Brighton, and listen to Last Word on BBC Radio 4.

BREMF’s patron Dame Emma Kirkby writes:
“I am so glad that Deborah featured on the BBC Radio 4 memorial programme Last Word (thank you, Laurie Stras, for initiating this!). She was remembered along with three other remarkable and highly effective people; but I must confess to a childish delight that on the programme she featured last, almost literally having the last word. Her ‘contribution’ was not just spoken but also sung, whether in her trademark ethereal high notes or in the glorious polyphony that she loved and did so much to nurture.”

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.”

Emma Kirkby continues:
“I am honoured and grateful to be a Patron of BREMF. Started twenty years ago by Deborah and Clare Norburn, the festival was immediately distinctive; tapping into the long-established cultural scene in Brighton, it added a musicological element with no hint of dryness. Deborah and Clare commissioned wonderful artists for posters and staged productions, and engaged the best performers,  British and international, to play in Brighton’s most interesting and friendly spaces, indoors or out. Above all, they searched for companions young and old to share the enterprise: locally, a host of genial and hard-working volunteers, ever more singers in groups of all sizes, and the many schoolchildren invited to join in.  (I personally am excited and grateful that Deborah set up a date in this year’s Festival, on which Dowland Youth Works, a group which at one remove owes its existence to a BREMF event in 2013, will meet and work with young singer-songwriters from the area).

Nationally, even internationally, BREMF has played a part in the early careers of so many excellent artists, vocal and instrumental. Some brought their own  programmes, appreciating the special venues found for them; others were thrilled to join the always imaginative special productions. There is by now a rich filmed archive of these; I managed to get to some of them, and look forward to catching up at leisure with more; and those un-filmed events, from earlier years, just have to glow in the memory.

I have heard of a term now circulating in various circles, including the political: “Soft Power”. In this book by Joseph S Nye Junior, subtitled “the means to success in world politics”, he described it thus: “the ability to co-opt rather than coerce. It  involves shaping the preferences of others through appeal and attraction. Soft power is non-coercive, using culture, political values, and foreign policies to enact change.” As we fight our corner for the arts, we cannot ignore the political, and it heartens me to know that “culture” is given some serious weight; another  recurring phrase “well-being”, is also creeping into some politicians’ speeches, even in association with “the arts”!

Deborah was indefatigable in every way, (not least in her dealings with local government and grant-giving bodies!); she was also imaginative, learned,  inspired, and, I would say, a living embodiment of the skills quoted above; also much loved, and a major contributor to the well-being of all of us. We miss her very much; and wish Cathy and her current team the very best for this month’s festival, and the future of BREMF.”

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.