English countertenor Tim Mead’s voice is clean, serene, and direct, with a chameleon-like ability to remain subtly expressive in music from Handel to George Benjamin’s opera “Written on Skin,” in which Mead sings a queasily erotic and effective Boy. When I talked to Mead this month, he had just finished singing a project in Malta, after a two-week quarantine in Athens. The next day, he was moving on to Paris to sing Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion.” Despite the travel inefficiencies, Mead was grateful for a flash of normalcy in an abnormal year.
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