Jane Manning

Jane Manning OBE (born 20 September 1938) is an English concert and opera soprano, writer on music, and Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Music. She has been described by one critic as "the irrepressible, incomparable, unstoppable Ms. Manning – life and soul of British contemporary music"

In 1966, she married the composer Anthony Payne, but she does not use her married name professionally.

The daughter of Gerald Manville Manning and Lily Manning (née Thompson), Manning was born in Norwich in 1938 and educated at Norwich High School for Girls, the Royal Academy of Music (graduating LRAM in 1958), and the Scuola di Canto at Cureglia, Switzerland. She was promoted to ARCM in 1962.

Manning's London début was in 1964 and her first BBC broadcast in 1965. She first sang at a Henry Wood Promenade Concert in 1972, was part of The Matrix with Alan Hacker, founded her own virtuoso ensemble, called Jane's Minstrels, in 1988, and has sung regularly in concert halls and festivals throughout Europe, specializing in contemporary music, with more than three hundred world premières given. She toured Australia and New Zealand in 1978, 1980, 1982, 1984, 1986, 1990, 1996, 2000, and 2002, and the United States in 1981, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1993, 1996, and 1997.

Manning's unique voice and infallible sense of pitch have made her an exemplary performer of new music. She is the author of an important book called New Vocal Repertory. She is also widely considered to be one of the world's finest performers of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire.

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