Colin Timms was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and as a postgraduate at King’s College, London, where he was supervised by Thurston Dart and Brian Trowell. After lecturing at the Queen’s University, Belfast, he moved to the University of Birmingham in 1973. He has edited chamber duets and cantatas by Agostino Steffani (two volumes, published by Garland and A-R Editions) and also, in collaboration with Lowell Lindgren (MIT), edited the composer’s correspondence with Giuseppe Riva. His monograph on Steffani’s life and works, Polymath of the Baroque (Oxford University Press, 2003), won the British Academy’s Derek Allen Prize. Having published on other composers, such as Corelli, Vivaldi and Marcello, he contributed forty articles to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. His research extends also to Alessandro Stradella (editions of cantatas and of an oratorio for the Edizione Nazionale of his opera omnia, of which he is a board member) and to Handel (edition of Theodora for the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe). His course on editing is a distinctive feature of his specialist teaching, which deals with topics from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. He has conducted many concerts of vocal and orchestral music, including performances of Handel’s Solomon and Jephtha, Bach’s St John Passion and B-minor Mass, the Verdi Requiem, Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, Tippett’s Child of Our Time and Britten’s War Requiem. He has also conducted stage productions of operas by Monteverdi, Steffani and Handel.
Successful Ph.D. dissertations on Thomas Morley as a Music Publisher, Schuetz’s Passion settings, the cantata spirituale e morale, Handel’s opera Poro, Domenico Dragonetti, Tchaikovsky’s songs and Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas.