Countertenor Timothy Parsons moves easily between the fifteenth century and the twenty-first. He has sung on six Grammy-nominated recordings, among them Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil with the Clarion Choir and Benedict Sheehan’s Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom and Akathist, on both of which he is a featured soloist. He appears regularly with leading early-music ensembles including Blue Heron, the Clarion Choir, TENET Vocal Artists, and Res Facta.

His 2026–27 season includes both Bach Passions, the St. Matthew with Trinity Church NYC and the St. John as soloist with TENET Vocal Artists, as well as Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles with the Bach Choir of Bethlehem, a U.S. tour of Alireza Farhang’s Collapse with France’s Ensemble Mêtis, and Stockhausen’s Stimmung with Ekmeles.

As a soloist, Timothy has appeared frequently with Trinity Church NYC, as well as with the Charlotte Master Chorale, the Stamford Symphony, the Asheville Symphony, and the Bach Society of Charleston. The San Francisco Chronicle found his singing so “magnificently muscular” that it proposed a new vocal category just for him: the heldencountertenor.

For a decade, Timothy was a staff alto with the Choir of Trinity Wall Street (now Trinity Church NYC), where he sang more than a thousand liturgies and roughly half of Bach’s surviving cantatas. With Trinity he performed at Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival, the Festival Oude Muziek Utrecht, and the Montreal Bach Festival, and sang in the world premieres of two Pulitzer Prize–winning operas, Du Yun’s Angel’s Bone and Ellen Reid’s p r i s m, recording both. As alto lay clerk at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, he sang eight services a week in a choral tradition dating to 1526, an experience that reshaped his sense of what a singing life could be.

Timothy is a core member of Ekmeles, a new-music vocal ensemble specializing in microtonality and extended techniques and the first American group to receive the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation’s Ensemble Prize, and appears on its recordings We Live the Opposite Daring and Nonsongs.

He has toured extensively with a variety of ensembles. With the Clarion Choir, his longest professional association, he gave the Russian premieres of Maximilian Steinberg’s Passion Week in St. Petersburg and Moscow, a work composed in secret during the Soviet ban on sacred music and never before heard in the country where it was written, and joined the English Concert for three Handel tours, from Carnegie Hall to Madrid, Paris, and London. He has also toured Monteverdi with Apollo’s Fire, Latin American polyphony to Ecuador and Cuba with Meridionalis, and new music across Europe with Ekmeles, including stops in Oslo, Tallinn, and Zürich.

Whether singing Ockeghem or Stockhausen, Timothy approaches the page as a doorway to living sound rather than a script to execute. He brings that approach home to Vermont, where he teaches voice, directs Ampersand’s community choir, &choir, and serves as the ensemble’s Director of Concert Programming. He is also Interim Music Director of the Brattleboro Camerata, and when he’s not singing polyphony, he’s probably playing banjo.

From Trinity Wall Street’s Messiah,
The Choir of Trinity Wall Street; Trinity Baroque Orchestra; Andrew Megill, conductor