Biography

Academia

At Illinois State University, Dr. Vickers is Artist Teacher of Voice and was named Distinguished Professor of Music in 2023, the first School of Music faculty member to achieve the rank in four decades. He is one of only 65 such Distinguished Professors since Illinois State University's founding in 1857.

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Dr. Vickers joined the faculty in 2012, where he teaches applied voice, leads the Opera Workshop courses, and teaches song literature. He has served as a member of the Ombudsperson Council, on the Academic Senate, on the University Research Council, on the President's DIAC, countless search committees for key University leadership roles, and on both College and School curriculum committees, as well as the CFSC and the SFSC, among a host of other service roles. 

Scholarship

Vickers was a 2020–2021 U.S. Fulbright Scholar to the United Kingdom, for which his primary project was the continued research and preliminary writing of The Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts: A History of the Britten–Pears Era, 1948–1986 (The Boydell Press, forthcoming).

Vickers has edited and contributed to Childhood and the Operatic Imaginary since 1900 with Joy H. Calico (Oxford University Press, 2026), Elizabeth Sweeting: The Best and Happiest Days with Philip Reed (Bittern Press, 2026), Elizabeth Maconchy in Context with Lucy Walker (Cambridge University Press, 2026), Benjamin Britten in Context with Vicki Stroeher (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and Benjamin Britten Studies: Essays on An Inexplicit Art with Vicki Stroeher (The Boydell Press, 2017).

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His article introducing Benjamin Britten’s “Epilogue” (1945) to The Holy Sonnets of John Donne — which Vickers discovered, unknown and long forgotten in the Britten–Pears Archive — is published in The Musical Times (Winter 2015) with an expanded version in Literary Britten: Words and Music in Benjamin Britten’s Vocal Works (The Boydell Press, 2018). He has published the history of Britten’s only Russian cycle The Poet’s Echo in Peter Pears’s English-language translation — and the couple’s many performances of it — in The Musical Times (Summer 2023). His chapter “Amanuensis of the Sea: Peter Maxwell Davies’s Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2 and the Antarctic Symphony” appears in The Sea and the British Musical Imagination, edited by Christopher Scheer and Eric Saylor (The Boydell Press, 2016).

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Vickers has also contributed essays to the 2012 Coventry Cathedral Golden Jubilee (The Bliss Trust), writing about Arthur Bliss’s The Beatitudes in the shadow of Britten’s War Requiem, in addition to several essays for the exhibition booklets published by the Britten–Pears Foundation for their annual exhibitions, including Britten and Women (2022-2023); “‘The Echo of the Song’: Pears and Twentieth-Century Composers” in “Such an artist to write for”: Inspiration and Collaboration (2020-2021; extended due to Covid-19); “An Illinois Snapshot: January 1940” in Britten in America (2018); and “The Indecency of the Closet” in Queer Talk: Homosexuality in Britten’s Britain (2017).

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Vickers has presented original research to the American Musicological Society (AMS); the North American British Music Studies Association (NABMSA); the Analyser les Processus de Création Musicale conference in Lilles, France (with OICRM and IRCAM); Music and the Moving Image; British-Russian Crossroads: Exchanges of Words and Music conference in Saint Petersburg, The Russian Federation; The Newbury Research Library Recital Series (Chicago); “The State We’re In: Researching Post-1900 British Music” conference at the University of Surrey (Guildford, England); 1915: Music, Memory, and the Great War at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Benjamin Britten at 100: An American Centenary Symposium (Illinois State University); and the Benjamin Britten on Stage and Screen centenary conference (University of Nottingham, England).

Vickers has performed countless lecture-recitals around the world, including on the American Musicological Society–Library of Congress Lecture Series in Washington, D.C.

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Vickers has presented invited lectures and papers on Benjamin Britten to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Richard Murphy Musicology Colloquium at the Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Rey M. Longyear Distinguished Lecture Series at the University of Kentucky, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance (Greenwich, London), and numerous lecture recitals at The Red House, Aldeburgh.

His 2011 dissertation for the Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — “‘The Ineffable Moments Will Be Harder Won’: The Genesis, Creative Process and Early Performance History of Michael Tippett’s The Heart’s Assurance” — was awarded the 2014 Nicholas Temperley Prize for Excellence in a Dissertation. 

Song

Vickers frequently commissions and premieres new song cycles around the world, including the recent premiere of British composer Colin Matthews’s Six Chinese Songs, composed in memory of the tenor’s father, John E. Vickers (1942–2017).

Vickers was thrilled to première the vocal cycle he commissioned by American composer Tony Solitro — a tour de force work titled War Wedding — setting the poetry of the Welsh poet Alun Lewis, as well as the première of Ke-Chia Chen’s Three Frost Songs with pianist R. Kent Cook. Vickers has also created song cycles by John David Earnest, Roy Magnuson, Jerrold Morgulas, Joseph Summer, Alexander Zhurbin, Jonathan Green, Alex Stephenson, and Zachary Wadsworth, among many others. He has forthcoming premieres of cycles by Martha Horst, Thomas Schuttenhelm, Sid Richardson, Timothy Bowlby, and Solitro.

A regular contributor at Britten’s home, The Red House, and with Britten Pears Arts, Vickers has appeared in recitals at The Red House, and has written for and presented for multiple annual exhibitions. As a frequent interpreter of Britten’s music, Vickers has performed the Burns, Donne, Hardy, Hölderlin, Pushkin, and Michelangelo cycles, in addition to the Canticles, the orchestral cycles, and the War Requiem.

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In 2010, Vickers gave the world première performance of Benjamin Britten’s “Epilogue” to The Holy Sonnets of John Donne (sixty-five years after its 1945 composition), using his own transcription from the composer’s lost manuscript, which Vickers uncovered in the Britten-Pears Library.

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​Recordings

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Justin Vickers: The Poet’s Echo — Songs of Benjamin Britten, John David Earnest, and Colin Matthews, November 2023. The disc features the world-premiere recording of Benjamin Britten’s The Poet’s Echo sung by a tenor in Peter Pears’s English-language performance translation, the world-premiere recording of Benjamin Britten’s “Epilogue” (1945) to The Holy Sonnets of John Donne (discovered by Justin Vickers in 2009), Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, Britten’s “Um Mitternacht” (1960), and two world-premiere recordings of new song cycles written for Vickers: Colin Matthews’s Six Chinese Songs and John David Earnest’s Songs of Hadrian. [Albany Records (TROY 1949); Justin Vickers, tenor; John Orfe, pianist]

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Caledonian Scenes: Songs of Judith Weir, Benjamin Britten, and Hamish MacCunn, 2019. The world première recordings of Scots composer Hamish MacCunn’s Cycle of Six Love-Lyrics and selected songs, alongside Benjamin Britten’s Four Burns Songs (in Colin Matthews’s piano arrangement) and Judith Weir’s Scotch Minstrelsy [Albany Records (TROY 1800); Justin Vickers, tenor; Gretchen Church and Geoffrey Duce, pianists]

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Full Fathom Five, 2015. Musical Settings of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, including the première recording of Michael Tippett’s song cycle Songs for Ariel with harpsichord and tenor [Navona Records / Parma Recordings; R. Kent Cook, harpsichordist]

Shakespeare’s Memory, 2014. Shakespeare Sonnets of Joseph Summer for Voice and String Quartet, Voice and Piano [Navona Records / Parma Recordings; Kalmia String Quartet; Ian Watson, pianist]

The Fair Ophelia, 2013. Excerpts from Joseph Summer’s operatic setting of Shakespeare’s Hamlet [Navona Records / Parma Recordings]​

The tenor has given numerous performances of Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, notably at The Juilliard School’s Paul Hall, and Canticle I — My Beloved is Mine, Canticle II — Abraham and Isaac, and Canticle III — Still falls the Rain.

Opera

An active performer, the American lyric tenor has performed frequently at Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher and Alice Tully Halls at Lincoln Center, the 92nd Street Y, Symphony Space, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Kennedy Center, The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., Vienna's Stephansdom, Moscow's International House of Music, Albania’s National Opera House, Shenyang’s Grand Theatre, and Beijing’s Forbidden City Concert Hall.

He has been lauded for his “beautiful, crystalline tone” and “a marriage of both supple voice and striking good looks.” In opera, concert, recital, and in the recording studio, Vickers is every bit as comfortable singing literature ranging from Michael Tippett and Benjamin Britten to Verdi’s La traviata and Joseph Summer’s contemporary operatic setting of Hamlet. 

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Vickers made his Carnegie Hall debut in November 1999 with Maestro Eve Queler and the Opera Orchestra of New York in the North American première of Donizetti’s Adelia, returning there in February 2000 to perform in Lucrezia Borgia alongside Renée Fleming and Marcello Giordani. For his Lucrezia Borgia performance as Rustighello, Classical Singer wrote that Vickers possessed: “A sweet, flexible voice and a lively, highly specific projection of the text that could set an excellent example for singers on this and other stages.” Vickers returned to Carnegie Hall in Meyerbeer’s masterpiece Les Huguenots, and was also a participant in Carlo Bergonzi’s Otello with Maestro Queler, covering the role of Cassio, a role he performed with Queler in Mexico with the Orchesta Sinfónica del Estado de México.

He appeared with The Washington National Opera, Opera Orchestra of New York, the Minnesota Opera, Hawaii Opera Theatre, Opera Boston, and the Connecticut Opera, as well as the National Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Opera Orchestra, the Florida Orchestra, the Illinois Symphony Orchestra, the Russian State Symphony Capella, the Liaoning Symphony Orchestra, and the Orquesta Sinfónica del Estado de México, to name a few. His international engagements have taken him to the concert halls and opera houses of Austria, England, Spain, Albania, Russia, China, and Mexico. In 2006, he assumed his first staged Gennaro in Lucrezia Borgia for Opera Boston where he was celebrated in the Boston Globe as “tall and swaggering, his singing sensitive and elegant… with a ringing tone!” Based on the success of that role, he was invited by The Washington National Opera to cover the role of Gennaro at the last minute for their 2008-2009 performances of Lucrezia Borgia with Renée Fleming again singing the title role, under the baton of Maestro Plácido Domingo. Vickers has been likened to a young Nicolai Gedda and after his performances as the title role in Idomeneo, The Washington Post declared him “a pliant Mozartian tenor.” With an operatic repertoire of more than thirty leading tenor roles, Vickers has performed the title role in Mozart’s Idomeneo, Tamino in Die Zauberflöte, Belmonte in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Ferrando in Così fan tutte, Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni, Roméo in Roméo et Juliette, Rodolfo in La bohème, Rinuccio in Gianni Schicchi, Alfredo in La traviata, Cassio in Otello, Lennie in Of Mice and Men, Gabriel von Eisenstein and Alfredo in Die Fledermaus, and the Italian Tenor in Der Rosenkavalier.

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He has created numerous roles in world première operas and symphonies, including Mario in Francis Thorne’s Mario and the Magician (recorded for Albany Records); Giovanni in the revised version of Daniel Catán’s La hija de Rappaccini, in which Vickers performed the world première of a newly-composed aria for Giovanni; and the tenor in Alexander Zhurbin’s Fourth Symphony, the City of the Plague. Additional premières include Amedeo “Dedo” Modigliani in Jerold Morgulas’s Anna and Dedo for the Moscow Chamber Opera (Arbat); Leo Stein in William Banfield’s Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On (in a triple bill with Ned Rorem’s Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters, in which he essayed Samuel; and Virgil Thomson’s Capital Capitals, taking on the verbose Capital II. The New York Times called Vickers’ interpretations in the Stein Trilogy “playfully operatic,” noting that his “crisp diction suddenly made whole lines of Stein’s patter start to make sense!”). Vickers created the role of Tom Cobb in Seymour Barab’s comic opera A Perfect Plan, and in the American première of Zhurbin’s The Seagull, Vickers sang the role of Konstantin Treplev opposite Judith Blazer’s Arkadina.

Vickers has performed alongside such esteemed artists as Renée Fleming, Stephanie Blythe, Mariella Devia, Yvonne Kenny, Barbara Qunitiliani, Marcello Giordani, Paul Plishka, Peter Rose, and Dmitri Hvorostovski, singing under the baton of Anton Coppola, Kurt Klippstatter, John Rutter, Gianluca Marcianò, Eve Queler, Karen Keltner, Richard Buckley, Joseph Colaneri, Willie Anthony Waters, Antony Walker, Michael Barrett, Valery Polyanski, and Scott Burgess, among others.

Oratorio and Concert

Johann Sebastian Bach, Magnificat, BWV 243

Lexington Philharmonic (George Zack, conductor)      

Johann Sebastian Bach, St Matthew Passion, BWV 244                                   

Brooklyn Academy of Music (Sir Jonathan Miller, director; Paul Goodwin, conductor)

Johann Sebastian Bach, Kantate No 55: Ich armer Mensch, ich Sündenknecht

Central Chamber Ensemble, Lexington, Kentucky (Michael Rintamaa, continuo conductor)

Johann Sebastian Bach, Kantate No 130: Herr Gott, dich loben alle wir

Allerton Music Barn Festival, Illinois (Ollie Watts Davis; Fred Stolzfus, conductor)

Ludwig van Beethoven, Ninth Symphony

Lexington Philharmonic, Kentucky (George Zack, conductor)

Illinois State University Symphony Orchestra (Maurizio Colasanti, conductor)          

Illinois Symphony Orchestra (Ken Lam, conductor)         

Benjamin Britten, War Requiem, Op. 66

University of Kentucky Symphony Orchestra (John Nardolillo, conductor)

Illinois State University Symphony Orchestra (Karyl Carlson, conductor)

Benjamin Britten, Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op. 31 and Canticle III Still

Falls the Rain, Op. 55 (Juilliard Chamber Music Ensemble)

Paul Hall, The Juilliard School, New York City

Benjamin Britten, Nocturne, Op. 60

Sinfonia da Camera (Ian Hobson, conductor)

Foellenger Great Hall, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Urbana, Illinois

Benjamin Britten, “Now sleeps the crimson petal”

Sinfonia da Camera (Ian Hobson, conductor)

      Foellenger Great Hall, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Urbana, Illinois

Benjamin Britten, The Company of Heaven, (1937)

Bury Bach Choir, Bury St Edmund’s Cathedral, England (Philip Reed, conductor)*

*Postponed due to COVID-19

Anton Bruckner, Te Deum                                       

New England Symphonic Ensemble (Carnegie Hall)         

René Clausen, A New Creation

The Illinois Chorale (René Clausen, conductor)

Richard Einhorn, Voices of Light                                           

Master Chorale of Tampa Bay; Florida Orchestra (Rick Zielinski, conductor)                      

Edward Elgar, The Dream of Gerontius

Illinois State University Symphony Orchestra (Karyl Carlson, conductor)

George Frederic Handel, Messiah                                          

New England Symphonic Ensemble (Carnegie Hall; John Rutter, conductor)

Cathedral Choral Society (Packer Chapel, Bethlehem; Russell Jackson, conductor)

Lexington Philharmonic, Kentucky (George Zack, conductor)                               

George Frederic Handel, Dixit Dominus                                            

Cathedral Choral Society (Nativity Cathedral, Bethlehem; Russell Jackson, conductor) 

Franz Joseph Haydn, Nelsonmesse

Stephansdom, Vienna, and Bergkirche, Eisenstadt, Austria (Rick Zielinski, conductor)

Bury Bach Choir, Bury St Edmund’s Cathedral, England (Philip Reed, conductor)*

*Postponed due to COVID-19

Lexington Philharmonic, Kentucky (George Zack, conductor)                               

Franz Joseph Haydn, Die Schöpfung                                      

Choral Society of Grace Church, New York City (John Maclay, conductor)

Franz Joseph Haydn, Die Jahreszeiten

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Franz Joseph Haydn, Paukenmesse                             

Choral Society of Grace Church, New York City (John Maclay, conductor)

Georg Melchior Hoffmann, Kantate: Meine Seele rühmt und preist        

(Formerly attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach, BWV 189)

Central Chamber Ensemble, Lexington, Kentucky (Michael Rintamaa, continuo conductor)

Felix Mendelssohn, Elijah

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Felix Mendelssohn, Paulus

Second Sunday Salon Series, Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, Illinois

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Grand Mass in C

New England Symphonic Ensemble (Carnegie Hall)         

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Requiem

Choral Society of Grace Church, New York City (John Maclay, conductor)

Gioacchino Rossini, Stabat Mater

Illinois State University Symphony Orchestra (Maurizio Colasanti, conductor)

Steven Stucky, The Stars and the Roses

Illinois Modern Ensemble (Stephen Taylor, conductor)

Red Note New Music Festival – Faculty Chamber Ensemble (Karyl Carlson, conductor)

Georg Philipp Telemann, Kantate: Ich weiß, daß mein Erlöser lebt

(Formerly attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach, BWV 160)

Central Chamber Ensemble, Lexington, Kentucky (Michael Rintamaa, continuo conductor)

Frank Tichelli, First Symphony

Illinois State University Wind Symphony (Gary Green, conductor)

Michael Tippett, A Child of Our Time

Illinois State University Symphony Orchestra (Karyl Carlson, conductor)               

Chamber Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, On Wenlock Edge for tenor, piano, and string quartet, and Four Hymns for tenor, viola, and piano

Mannes College of Music (John Yaffé, conductor)

92ND Street Y, New York City (John Yaffé, conductor)

Giuseppe Verdi, Requiem

Illinois State University Symphony Orchestra (Maurizio Colasanti, conductor)                    

Alexander Zhurbin, Fourth Symphony, City of the Plague

Moscow State Symphony Capella, International House of Music (Valery Polyansky, conductor)