The Catherine Lambert English Song Prize took place this year at St. Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith, London on 8 March 2026. In the final we had four very imaginatively conceived programmes, and some excellent performances in both speech and singing. 

Winners Lambert Prize 2026 | Zara Musoni, Quentin Ballard, Ryaan Vyas, Evangelos Zacharias

• First Prize was baritone Rayaan Vyas (from Eton College); at only 16 years of age he already has a well-developed voice, especially in the lower register, and he sings with pleasing ease and great sensitivity to the words. His programme was The Restless Heart.
• Second prize was awarded to baritone Evangelos Zacharias (from the West London Free School), who at the very young age of 13 displayed extremely well-developed technical control, and gave a very committed performance of his nicely varied programme, The Drum that gathers Song and Soul.  
• The competition’s third prize was awarded to soprano Zara Musoni (from the Guildhall Junior School), who gave an especially touching performance of ‘When I am dead my dearest‘ by Liza Lehmann as part of her programme Love and Loss.
• The Speech Prize was awarded to tenor Quentin Ballard (from Latymer Upper School) for his thoughtful and moving performance of Auden’s poem, ‘Stop all the Clocks‘, which was part of his programme Loss. 

We are very grateful to Catherine Lambert for her ongoing sponsorship of this competition, and the finalists were very excited and touched that at the age of 107 she had – as she always does – sent a hand-written letter to be read to them, thanking them for continuing to promote the English language in Word and Song.

Many thanks to the judges for this year’s competition: James Gilchrist, Lynda Morgan and Janine Roebuck.
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Above report: Lynda Morgan

Lambert Prize Organiser, Carolyn Richards writes:

Lynda Morgan, Patricia Williams, Zara Musoni, James Partridge, Quentin Ballard, James Gilchrist, Ryaan Vyasm Evangelos Zacharias, Andrei Liushkin, Janine Roebuck

This competition began in 2002 an idea of Graham Trew, our Chairman at the time. I began to assist and eventually take over from him in 2006. In 2007 this competition became The Catherine Lambert Junior Recital Prize when Catherine Lambert began her sponsorship of the first 2 prizes.

Over the years, the competition has had entries from The Royal Academy of Music, The Royal College, Guildhall and Trinity Junior Departments as well as The Royal Northern College Juniors. Youngsters have also come from secondary schools in Cambridge, Derby, Glasgow, Lincoln, Manchester, Rugby and Tonbridge.  Most preliminary rounds have been held in Birmingham and London. The Finals were held in Schools in Manchester, Hammersmith, Lincoln, Wimbledon and at a number of London Conservatoires.

This year, we were at St. Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith, London. Although entries were less than usual, we had four great programmes from 2 baritones, ‘The Restless Heart’ and ‘The Drum that gathers Song and Soul,’ from Eton College and West London Free School respectively, a soprano ‘Love and Loss’ from Guildhall Juniors and a tenor whose title was ‘Loss’ from Latymer Upper School.

Our sponsor, Catherine Lambert once again, wrote a lovely letter to read to the finalists, thanking them for their varied programmes and asking them to carry on promoting the English language in ‘Word’ and ‘Song.’