Cumbrian born Jess Dandy is widely regarded as the foremost British contralto of her generation and has been praised for her velvety plangent timbre, and her artistic remarkable immediacy. She studied Modern and Medieval Languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, and trained at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, where she is now a Fellow.
In the 2025/26 season, Jess makes house debuts at the Salzburg Easter Festival as Floßhilde in Das Rheingold, at the Bayerische Staatsoper as Lady Toodle in Die Englische Katze, and later in the summer at The Grange Festival. On the concert platform, she appears in performances of The Dream of Gerontius with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra/Kazuki Yamada and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic/Andrew Manze, Elgar’s Sea Pictures with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Antony Hermus and Handel’s Messiah with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment/Eamonn Dougan, the Irish Baroque Orchestra/Peter Whelan and the Tampere Philharmonic/Matthew Halls.
Recent highlights include her return to the BBC Proms for Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles, Thomas Adès’s Totentanz with the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester/Thomas Adès, Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette with the Bergen Philharmonic/Sir Mark Elder, Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 with the BBC Philharmonic/John Storgårds, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with the Boston Symphony/Ludovic Morlot, Handel’s Messiah with the Tampere Philharmonic/Matthew Halls, and Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder with the BBC Symphony Orchestra/Kristian Sallinen, among others.
Jess finds a natural habitat on the recital platform and enjoys working with a wide range of distinguished pianists, including Martin Roscoe, Dylan Perez, Malcolm Martineau, Chris Glynn, James Baillieu, Julius Drake, Gary Matthewman, Keval Shah, Ian Tindale, Sholto Kynoch, Anthony Hewitt, Gavin Roberts, Iain Burnside, Simon Lepper, Huw Watkins and Wolfram Rieger.
Recent recital highlights include her return to the Oxford International Song Festival with Keval Shah for the programme Eternity in an Hour, a recital at Wigmore Hall with Dylan Perez, and a performance at the University of York with Ben Goldscheider, Fenella Humphreys, and Martin Roscoe, among others.
In 2021, Jess was shortlisted for a Royal Philharmonic Society Award in the category of Young Artist. She is a multi-faceted artist with a keen interest in ecology, body psychology and spirituality. She is the co-founder of SongPath, a mental health initiative creating musical walking trails in nature for better mental health. With composer Alex Mills, she developed the Music & Being Collective, an open laboratory space exploring music and our sense of self through interdisciplinary dialogue.
