AnnMurray DBE

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  • Mezzo-Soprano

About Ann

Ann Murray was born in Dublin. Her extraordinary career has taken her to the greatest opera houses and orchestras in the world. Amongst her many accolades, in 2002 Ann Murray was appointed an honorary Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in the Golden Jubilee Queen’s Birthday Honours. In 2004 she was awarded the Bavarian Order of Merit.

Her international operatic engagements have taken her to Hamburg, Dresden, Cologne, Berlin, Munich, Paris, Zurich, Brussels, Amsterdam, Milan, Vienna, Salzburg, the Chicago Lyric Opera, Los Angeles Opera and The Metropolitan Opera, New York.

In concert, she has appeared with the world’s great orchestras and her recital appearances have taken her to Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Geneva, Dresden, Zurich, Frankfurt, Madrid, London, Dublin, the Aldeburgh, Edinburgh, Munich and Salzburg festivals and both the Konzerthaus and Musikverein in Vienna. Her discography reflects not only her broad concert and recital repertoire but also many of her great operatic roles.

Ann is based in London

Contact

Representation

Worldwide general management with Askonas Holt

News

Press

  • Complete Songs of Fauré, Vol 1

    Murray
    Jul 2016

    • Ann Murray, who spins long, velvety lines in songs ranging from Fauré’s first published work to the Cinq Mélodies “de Venise”, taking in a gorgeously supple Après un Rêve on the way.

  • Irish Culture in Britain: A Centenary Celebration

    Wigmore Hall
    Apr 2016

    • Just as deep melancholy, and a recollection of what Yeats called a “terrible beauty”, threatened to overwhelm us all, Ann Murray leapt in with a dazzle of patter-song doggerel. The traditional Phil the Fluter’s Ball – “with the toot of the flute and the twiddle on the fiddle-o, Hopping in the middle like a herrin’ on a griddle-o” – brought the house down. Murray was then presented, by Daniel Mulhall, the Irish ambassador, and John Gilhooly, with the Wigmore Medal. She deserved it for that performance alone, delivered with the finger-pointing, gossipy aplomb of one who might have propped up a Dublin bar all her life. Luckily for us she has, so far, decided against that path, preferring a world-class operatic, oratorio and lieder career which continues, after some four decades, busy as ever.

  • Britten The Turn of the Screw

    Snape Maltings Aldeburgh
    Oct 2015

    • In a fine cast, everyone hit a raw nerve. Bevan, in lustrous voice, lost a few words but commanded attention. Ann Murray made a remarkably potent Mrs Grose, and the two ghosts, Staples’s Quint and Jane Irwin’s Miss Jessel, had plenty of petulant vehemence. The children, Joshua Kenney’s Miles and Louise Moseley’s Flora, provided perfectly horrible blank complicity as the screw turned.

    • Inflecting with an intelligence and subtlety that suggests housekeeper Mrs Grose understands more than she says

    • Ann Murray’s convincing Mrs Grose

  • Mozart Le nozze di Figaro

    Salzburg Festival
    Aug 2025

    • Ann Murray, on crisp, Maggie Smith form, sizzled as Marzellina.

      • Fiona Maddocks, The Observer
      • 23 August 2015

  • Brahms & Schumann: Lieder

    Linn Records
    Feb 2015

    • Here are 25 songs that take you to the heights of 19th Century Romanticism, performed beautifully by some of the best current Lieder artists. ... This is a marvelous Lieder album.

    • Ann Murray sings with still-steady tone, sensitive phrasing and a quiet, concentrated intensity, flaring into passion in the central ‘An die Königin Elisabeth’ and culminating in a hypnotic, otherworldly ‘Gebet’ as Mary prays for deliverance. Here, and elsewhere, Murray has the art of increasing the tension without raising the volume.

    • Her Schumann selection begins with a touchingly delivered account of the Poems of Mary, Queen of Scots in which her artistic intelligence and commitment are as apparent as her skilful balance between words and notes.

      • BBC Music Magazine
      • 01 June 2015

Discography