Peter Pears was an English tenor, one of the defining British singers of the twentieth century and the closest vocal collaborator of Benjamin Britten.

In the Pristine catalogue he appears in Britten, Beethoven, Walton and English opera, including Billy Budd, War Requiem, Nocturne and Horenstein’s Missa solemnis.

Pears’s singing combined verbal precision, intellectual focus and a uniquely personal tenor colour. His voice could sound fragile, piercing, ironic and deeply human within a single phrase.

His page is essential. Pears gives the British vocal shelf its most unmistakable line: narrow as a beam, bright as thought.