Christopher Preston Thompson

Christopher Preston Thompson is a New York City based tenor, historical harpist, and musicologist focused on early and new music. He has performed as soloist in venues throughout the United States, including NYC’s Carnegie Hall, and enjoys an active solo and chamber music career in NYC.

Christopher is the founding Artistic Director of Concordian Dawn, ensemble for medieval music, whose recent studio album, Veni Redemptor Gentium (AVIE Records), was hailed as an “utterly engrossing” (ConcertoNet) and “marvelous disk” with “exemplary performances, abounding with tonal beauty, crisp articulation, and clear, expressive textual delivery” (Early Music America). The ensemble’s “mesmerizing” (Early Music America) debut album, Fortuna Antiqua et Ultra (MSR Classics), was released under his direction in December of 2021 to critical acclaim. In July of 2022, Cornell University Press published a collaborative book-recording project between Christopher, the ensemble, and medieval studies scholar, Sarah Kay, entitled Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera, and the ensemble’s “palpably enchanting,” “unforgettable” (Fanfare) second album, based on the aforementioned collaboration, was released in October of 2023 (MSR Classics). All three albums have been featured on radio stations nationally and internationally, including WQXR-NYC’s Old School with Rocky Duval, Robert Aubrey Davis and SiriusXM’s Millenium of Music, and many more.

Recent season highlights include a performance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Fall Festival in association with the museum’s exhibit Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-50; album debut performances of Veni Redemptor Gentium with the Cambridge Society for Early Music; an Artist-in-Residence performance of Le Roman de Fauvel at UC-Davis; the debut of their program Vox Femina at the Grenta Music Festival; and performances for the Morgan Library and Museum’s After Hours Concert Series, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library’s Seven Floors Up Concert Series, and the GEMS Midtown Concert Series. Christopher is a resident member of Grammy-nominated ensemble for Renaissance polyphony, Pomerium, and of the Chamber Choir of St. Luke in the Fields. He has performed roles for such companies as Heartbeat Opera, On Site Opera, Encompass New Opera Theater, The Great River Shakespeare Festival, Red Bull Theater, Tabula Rasa Dance Theater, and many others.

He is on the voice faculty at New York University’s Steinhardt School, the music faculty at Lehman College-City University of New York, and the voice faculty at Borough of Manhattan Community College-CUNY. Other publications and recordings include “Pizza, Opera, and Hybridity” in the edited collection Pizza is God (Düsseldorf: NRW-Forum, 2018); Musical Games, Riddles, and Puzzles of the Renaissance with Pomerium (Old Hall Recordings, 2019); Missa Tu Es Petrus with the Chamber Choir of St. Luke in the Fields (MSR Classics, 2018); and review articles for the Bulletin of the Historical Harp Society (vol. 28, no. 1, 2019) and Comitatus (vol. 51, 2020).

Christopher is a contributing author for Total Baroque Magazine, and he has led performance practice workshops and given performance lectures for Princeton University, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Modern Language Association, the Universities of California-Berkeley and Davis, Bard College, Stanford University, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, among others. Please visit www.christopherprestonthompson.com and www.concordiandawn.com for more.