Since his debut with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra in 1982, Peter Butterfield has been performing internationally in both North America and Europe. Peter grew up in Victoria, B.C., and studied at McGill University in Montreal. He moved to Europe in 1987 and continued his vocal studies, and the building of his solo tenor career, in Manchester, Florence and London. Highlights of his solo-singing career include a live worldwide broadcast of Bach’s B minor Mass from Suntory Hall, Tokyo, under Sir John Eliot Gardiner; performing the role of ‘Albert’ (Albert Herring, Britten) at the Aldeburgh Festival; a broadcast on the BBC (UK) of Britten’s War Requiem on Remembrance Day, 2001 and a video recording of Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers in Milan.
His choral experience includes everything from a treble in King’s College, Cambridge, to the Bayreuth Festival Chorus, the Opera di Monte Carlo, Winchester Cathedral Choir, Monteverdi Choir, Florence Opera, and the BBC Northern Singers. A 2002 recording of Hayden’s Creation Mass under Sir John Eliot Gardiner on the Philips label was named “CD of the Month” by Gramophone magazine. Peter Butterfield began conducting alongside his singing in 1995. He conducted various groups in England (being based there from 1991-2001), as a guest, and he was an associate conductor of ‘I Solisti Madrigale’ in Florence, Italy, from 1991-1999.
He moved back to the West Coast in 2001 and was the Artistic Director and Conductor of the Vancouver Cantata Singers for the 2001/2002 season. Peter has conducted several choral workshops as the guest of choirs in the Lower Mainland, and he was recently invited to participate in the International Choral Conductors’ Workshop sponsored by the Vancouver Chamber Choir. He established VancouverVoices in 2003.
