Dame Janet Abbott Baker, CH, DBE, FRSA (born 21 August 1933) is an English mezzo-soprano best known as an opera, concert, and lieder singer.

She was particularly closely associated with baroque and early Italian opera and the works of Benjamin Britten. During her career, which spanned the 1950s to the 1980s, she was considered an outstanding singing actress and widely admired for her dramatic intensity, perhaps best represented in her famous portrayal as Dido, the tragic heroine of Berlioz's magnum opus Les Troyens. As a concert performer, Baker was noted for her interpretations of the music of Gustav Mahler and Edward Elgar. David Gutman, writing in the Gramophone, described her performance of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder as "intimate, almost self-communing."

Baker was born in Hatfield, South Yorkshire, northern England. Her father was an engineer who sang in a male voice choir. Members of her family worked at Bentley pit, in Doncaster, South Yorkshire.^{[citation needed]} She attended York College for Girls and then Wintringham Girls' Grammar School in Grimsby. The death of her elder brother, Peter, when she was 10 years old, from a heart condition, was a formative moment that made her take responsibility for the rest of her life, she revealed in a BBC Radio 3 Lebrecht Interview in September 2011.

Terius Youngdell Nash (Born September 20, 1977), better known by his stage name The-Dream, is an American singer-songwriter and record producer. He is known for co-writing chart topping hits such as "Baby" for Justin Bieber, "Umbrella" for Rihanna and "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" for Beyoncé, as well as for his three solo albums, Love Hate, Love vs. Money, and Love King.

Terius Nash was born in Rockingham, North Carolina and moved with his mother, Reva Nash, to Atlanta at the age of 3. He played trumpet, drums, and guitar as a child. His mother died in 1992 when Nash was fifteen years old, an event which would inspire him to write songs. He states that the death of his mother gave him a "soft spot" for women, which he credits to his desire to write songs about female empowerment such as Rihanna's "Umbrella". He moved in with his grandfather, a concrete mason who instilled a strong work ethic in young Nash. Of his grandfather, Nash recalls "He came out of a bad time for blacks in the South, but even though we lived in the hood, we had a boat, some cars and a house that was paid for. So I’ve always had a different outlook on life. There’s nothing I can’t do."

Vernon George "Tod" Handley CBE (11 November 1930 – 10 September 2008) was a British conductor, known in particular for his support of British composers. He was born of a Welsh father and an Irish mother into a musical family in Enfield, London. He acquired the nickname "Tod" because his feet were turned in at his birth, which his father simply summarised: "They toddle". Handley preferred the use of the name "Tod" throughout his life over his given names.

Handley attended Enfield Grammar School. While in school, he watched the BBC Symphony Orchestra in its studio in Maida Vale, where by his own account he learned some of his conducting technique by watching Sir Adrian Boult. Later the two corresponded in the early 1950s and met around 1958. He spent a period in the Armed Forces and then attended Balliol College, Oxford, where he read English philology and became musical director of the University Dramatic Society. He also studied at the Guildhall School of Music in London, where his performing instrument was the double bass (in addition to the trombone and violin). After graduating he worked as a nursery gardener, bricklayer and petrol pump attendant during the day, studying and conducting amateur orchestras and choirs in the evening. He then became Sir Adrian Boult's pupil. During their first meeting he "was put through the worst two hours of counterpoint and harmony that I've ever faced" and was then asked how he would conduct a page of a score that Boult put in front of him, Sir Arnold Bax's Third Symphony, which Handley happened to have studied. Handley later conducted that work in the first concert he gave in London, with the symphony orchestra of Morley College. Handley remained a devoted champion of the music of Bax throughout his career.

Rosalind Anne Plowright OBE (born 21 May 1949) is an English opera singer who spent much of her career as a soprano but in 1999 changed to the mezzo-soprano range.

Rosalind Plowright was born in Worksop and studied at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and at the London Opera Centre.

Plowright made her professional debut with Glyndebourne Touring Opera in 1975 as Agathe in Der Freischütz. She sang Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni and the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro with the Glyndebourne Touring Opera in 1976 and 1977. Also in 1975, she appeared with both Welsh National Opera and Kent Opera before making her debut with English National Opera as the Page in Salome in 1976. She earned good notices in 1979 for her Fennimore in Delius' Fennimore and Gerda at London's Camden Festival.. She then appeared with ENO in the roles of Miss Jessel in The Turn of the Screw, Desdemona in Otello, Elizabeth I in Donizetti's Maria Stuarda, Hélène in Verdi's Les vêpres siciliennes, Elisabeth de Valois in Don Carlos, and Tosca. Her recording of Elizabeth I in Donizetti's Maria Stuarda, with Janet Baker as Mary, Queen of Scots, brought her wider recognition.