Dame Imogen Cooper gives her final performance at Wigmore Hall, accompanying the Dutch baritone Henk Neven in Schubert’s Winterreise as she retires after sixty years.
Dame Imogen Cooper, one of the leading British interpreters of Schubert and Schumann, plays Wigmore Hall in Marylebone for the last time on Tuesday 16 February 2027. She accompanies the Dutch baritone Henk Neven in a lunchtime Winterreise.
Cooper was born in north London in 1949, the daughter of the musicologist Martin Cooper. At twelve she was sent to the Paris Conservatoire, where she won a Premier Prix at seventeen.
She was mentored by Arthur Rubinstein and Clifford Curzon and studied in Vienna with Alfred Brendel. She gave the premiere of Thomas Adès’s Traced Overhead.
Song has run through her career, most of all in a long partnership with the baritone Wolfgang Holzmair. She was made a Dame in 2021.
In January 2026 she announced a thirteen-month farewell tour of Europe, after which she retires. This recital closes her six decades on the London stage.
Neven joins her in Schubert’s cycle of 24 songs for a rejected lover walking out into the winter.