Sonya Headlam

Soprano Sonya Headlam’s wide-ranging concert career encompasses historically informed performance, symphonic repertoire, and contemporary music, from Bach, Handel, and Mozart to Brahms, Mahler, and music of the present day.

Headlam has appeared as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, North Carolina Symphony, and the Hallé, with whom she made her UK debut in Handel’s Messiah in 2025. She is a frequent collaborator with Apollo’s Fire and Trinity Choir in New York. In the 2026-27 season, she makes her Omaha Symphony debut in Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915.

Her concert repertoire includes Handel’s Messiah; Bach’s Mass in B Minor; Mozart’s Great Mass in C Minor, Requiem, and Exsultate, jubilate; Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9; Mendelssohn’s Elijah; Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem; Mahler’s Symphonies Nos. 2 and 4; and Orff’s Carmina Burana. Her appearances with the New York Philharmonic include Handel’s Israel in Egypt under Jeannette Sorrell, with whom Headlam made her Philharmonic debut in 2023, and a 2025 program of Mozart and Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, alongside principal clarinetist Anthony McGill.

Headlam’s contemporary repertoire includes Julia Wolfe’s Steel Hammer at Carnegie Hall and Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians with the Bang on a Can All-Stars at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as well as Ellen Reid’s dreams of the new world at the PROTOTYPE Festival and Tyshawn Sorey’s Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) at the Park Avenue Armory.

A central part of Headlam’s artistic and scholarly work is her engagement with the music and life of Ignatius Sancho, the 18th-century Black British composer and writer. Headlam began her research on Sancho as a visiting scholar at Rutgers University, where she had previously earned her Doctor of Musical Arts. As a core member of The Raritan Players, an ensemble that explores overlooked 17th- and 18th-century repertoire and historical performance practices through period instruments and musicological research, she has helped bring Sancho’s music to contemporary audiences. She is the featured soprano on Sancho: Music of an 18th-Century Black Englishman (Centaur, 2025), recorded with the ensemble.

That work now extends into the creation of new music. The Raritan Players commissioned Trevor Weston’s Reflections for Headlam and historical keyboardist Rebecca Cypess. The song cycle for voice and historical piano sets excerpts from Sancho’s posthumously published 1782 collection, Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African. In 2026, Headlam and Cypess will give the work’s world-premiere performance in a program presented by the American Musicological Society and Rise Up Arts. A world-premiere recording of Reflections is forthcoming.

Headlam’s discography also includes In the Salon of Madame Brillon (Acis, 2023) and Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra (MSO Classics, 2026).