Guildhall School alumni triumph at the RPS Awards 2025

Claire Booth took home the Singer Award, adding to a stellar 2024/25 season which has already seen her perform the world premiere of Helen Grimes’ Folk with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs with the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, and appear at Wigmore Hall in a solo recital with Jâms Coleman and a celebration the 60th anniversary of the Nash Ensemble. The award also follows Claire’s significant contributions to marking Arnold Schoenberg’s 150th anniversary last year. During 2024 the soprano gave numerous performances of both the composer’s lieder and Pierrot Lunaire at the Glasshouse in Gateshead with the Royal Northern Sinfonia, at the Oxford International Song Festival and at the Schoenberg Centre in Vienna. She also sang in Schoenberg’s Ewartung with the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig and released two new recordings of his music for voice. Claire’s success means the RPS Singer Award has been won by a Guildhall School vocal graduate for two years in a row, with Nicky Spence OBE (Tenor 2009) having been awarded the prize in 2024. 

As the GBSR Duo, percussionist George Barton and pianist Siwan Rhys won the RPS Young Artist Award. The duo’s recent highlights include performances at Wigmore Hall, Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and Bold Tendencies, and recordings of Last Days by fellow Guildhall alumnus Oliver Leith (Composition 2015, Doctoral Composer-in-Residence 2019-22) and music by Lisa Illean on the composer’s portrait disc arcing, stilling, bending, gathering. Siwan also recorded Sarah Lianne Lewis’ letting the light in which won the Chamber-Scale Composition prize at this year’s RPS Awards. 

Reflecting on their studies at Guildhall School, the GBSR Duo said: 

We met at Guildhall School and rehearsed for and performed some of our first concerts there; both of us had been attracted to the School by the promise of a more progressive approach than we could find elsewhere. That promise was certainly fulfilled. Our second-year chamber music assessment was a four hour Morton Feldman piece in February, in a gradually-cooling art gallery with broken heating. Our first steps into the strange world of contemporary chamber music were supported wholeheartedly – especially, though not exclusively, by our principal teachers Richard Benjafield and Rolf Hind.

Congratulation to Clare, George and Siwan, and also to alumni Dinis Sousa (Piano 2019) and Francesca Chiejina (Soprano 2016) who were shortlisted for the Conductor and Singer Awards respectively.  

The 2025 Royal Philharmonic Society Awards took place on 6 March 2025 at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. Photography by Greg Milner.