Esther Lay (formerly Brazil) studied at The Queen’s College, Oxford, and the Royal Academy of Music. A finalist in the London Bach Singer’s Prize, she has appeared as a soloist with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Academy of Ancient Music, and the Dunedin Consort, and has toured and recorded extensively as a soloist and member of the Monteverdi Choir. She made her Carnegie Hall and BBC Proms solo artist debuts in 2015 with Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo with Sir John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists, with whom she recorded Bach’s B minor Mass and the spectacular solo soprano cantata BWV199, Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut, and was an artist in residence with the Accademia Monteverdiana in the Tuscan music festival Incontri in Terra di Siena. She appears as a soloist on the Dunedin Consort’s 2017 single-voice recording of Monteverdi’s Vespers. She is now a priest in the Church of England, and is serving her curacy at St Mary Magdalen, Oxford, where she is the first woman in nearly a thousand years to hold the post. She lives in Oxford with her husband, a serving naval officer, and their two children.