Charles Styles
Tenor
"The British tenor Charles Styles... nailed Vaudemont's difficult tessitura."
OPERA MAGAZINE
"And, what a performance Styles gave, his confidence impressing as much as his vocal excellence. He had no problem scaling the peaks, projecting with pinging, powerful assurance, and finding expressive nuance amid the climaxes... We will no doubt be hearing much more from him."
OPERA TODAY
"Styles, looking undaunted by the challenge facing him, sang with gleaming top notes, a warm middle register and considerable dramatic insight, his voice cutting comfortably through Bell’s Wagnerian textures throughout."
THE GUARDIAN
"The tenor soloist Charles Styles excelled...navigating some treacherous high climbs."
THE TELEGRAPH
"The most effective writing was for the tenor, intended to be Stuart Skelton but replaced at late notice by the excellent young Charles Styles."
THE TIMES
"Charles Styles stepped up to the mark, projecting a rather winning heroic vulnerability and defiance..."
CLASSICAL REVIEW
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About.
Charles Styles is a British tenor from Tamworth, Staffordshire, now based in the United States. In Summer 2026, he will be singing the role of Don José in La tragédie de Carmen for the prestigious Merola Opera Program in San Francisco. He is scheduled to graduate from the Yale School of Music in 2026. Roles he has undertaken while in America include Vaudemont in Tchaikovsky's Iolanta, Rodolfo in La bohème, and Turiddu in Cavalleria Rusticana. In 2025, Charles won the Connecticut District of the The Metropolitan Opera Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition. Recent European engagements include understudying the First Armed Man in Die Zauberflöte for Glyndebourne Festival Opera. In Europe, he is represented by Zelaya Artists.
Admired for his ‘vocal excellence' (Opera News), ‘gleaming top notes, a warm middle register and considerable dramatic insight’ (The Guardian), British tenor Charles Styles made his critically acclaimed London debut in March 2023, replacing Stuart Skelton at short notice in the world premiere of Iain Bell’s Beowulf with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Martyn Brabbins at the Barbican. Beowulf was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 18 April.
Born in Tamworth, Styles originally intended to become an academic. After scholarships to Eton and Oxford, he decided upon a singing career, following the encouragement of the conductor Christian Thielemann in 2017. Originally preferring private study to a conservatoire, he has been a pupil of tenor Brian Smith Walters since 2018. Styles graduated top of his faculty from Oxford with an MPhil in Philosophical Theology as a Clarendon Scholar in 2021. He made his professional operatic debut in 2022 as a member of the Glyndebourne Chorus.
Charles has benefited from the coaching and mentorship of distinguished artists such as Jon Fredric West, Cheryl Studer, Neil Shicoff, Dolora Zajick, Ramón Vargas, and Christine Goerke.
