Nigel Rogers, who has died aged 86, first came to international attention in 1967 as the lead tenor in the LP recording of Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers with the Monteverdi Choir of Hamburg and the Concentus Musicus of Vienna under Jürgen Jürgens. He seemed the very embodiment of virtuoso singing in the Italian style of the early 17th century. But what most impressed were his easy flexibility and effortless ornaments.

He always said that he learned this from the Indian singer Bhimsen Joshi, whom he met in 1964. Joshi had explained that whereas European singers trained first to create a lovely sound, Indian singers focused on flexibility.

Rogers could never make a sound that was less than lovely, so he worked on the flexibility. This came out most spectacularly when he recorded Monteverdi’s Orfeo under Jürgens in 1974.

Soon after that his operatic career took off: though he sang in all three Monteverdi operas, Orfeo remained his most popular role. But his impeccable diction also served him well in French and English music, as notably in his 1970 recording of Thomas Morley’s First Book of Ayres (1600) with Eugen Dombois on lute and Nikolaus Harnoncourt on gamba. The voice there sounds totally fresh throughout and his (carefully applied) ornaments have their usual pearly perfection.

It may well be the finest and best-judged recording so far of English lute-song: these three musicians never seem to put a foot wrong, performing Morley’s 18 songs in his order with immaculate taste throughout. Rogers had certainly known the music intimately for many years: I remember a detailed and inspiring discussion of the Morley book with him around the time of the recording.

Born in Wellington, Shropshire, Nigel was the son of Winifred (nee Roberts), a piano teacher, and Thomas Rogers, who sang in the local church. In due course Nigel sang in that choir, and there is even a recording of him as a boy treble singing Mendelssohn’s Hear My Prayer. From Wellington grammar school he went on a choral scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge (1953-56), where he sang under Boris Ord.

With an ambition to sing Italian opera he then went for private study to Rome (1957) and Milan (1958–59); but neither suited his temperament or his voice – which was always quiet and sweet. There is in fact a 1971 recording of Puccini’s Il Tabarro under Erich Leinsdorf, where Rogers sings the small role of “Voce de tenorino” in the distance; but that seems to be his only professional brush with standard Italian opera.

Eventually he found a suitable teacher in Gerhard Hüsch at the Musikhochschule in Munich (1959–64), where he studied mainly the German lieder repertory of the 19th century. While in Munich he co-founded the Studio der Frühen Musik, known in English-speaking lands as the Early Music Quartet, with Thomas Binkley, Andrea von Ramm and Sterling Jones.

With them he made his professional debut in 1961, toured widely and contributed to several successful LPs, including two discs of Carmina Burana (from the collection that found its way to a Bavarian monastery), one of Dowland, and one of 17th-century English “florid-song”, where he first showed what he had learned from Joshi.

In 1964 he left the Studio der Frühen Musik, initially because he had been invited to be understudy for Peter Pears at the Aldeburgh festival in the role of the Madwoman in Benjamin Britten’s Curlew River.

From 1972 to 1976 he held a teaching position at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, the specialist early music conservatory in Basel. There he took advantage of the marvellous library to study the treatises and other documents of Italian baroque music and put what he had learned into fact-based historical singing.

In 1978 he became a professor of classical singing at the Royal College of Music, London, from which he retired in 2000. He founded the vocal ensemble Chiaroscuro in 1979 to explore the repertory of Italian baroque music.

Later he extended it to include the Chiaroscuro Chamber Ensemble and the Chiaroscuro Baroque Orchestra, with which he made his conducting debut in 1985. He leaves a legacy of more than 70 recordings from the 12th century to Schubert, including his 1976 recording of Die Schöne Müllerin with Richard Burnett on a Graf hammerklavier of 1826.

Monteverdi’s Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda he recorded with both Gustav Leonhardt and the Leonhardt-Consort (1970) and with Reinhard Goebel and Music Antiqua Köln (1980). He returned to the title role of Monteverdi’s Orfeo with Charles Medlam and London Baroque (1983), and to the Vespers with Andrew Parrott and the Taverner Consort (1984).

The first four of his five marriages ended in divorce: in 1961 to Frederica Bement Lord, with whom he had a daughter, Francesca; in 1976 to Marika Faccendini; in 1987 to the cellist Laurie MacLeod; and in 1991 to the soprano Sheila Barnes. In 1999 he married the harpsichordist Lina Zilinskyte, with whom he had another daughter, Georgina.

Lina and his two daughters survive him.

• Nigel David Rogers, tenor, born 21 March 1935; died 19 January 2022