Soprano Ruby Hughes is equally active in historically oriented performances of Baroque music and in traditional repertory from Classical to contemporary. She also has a vigorous career in art song, often with Julius Drake or Joseph Middleton as accompanist.

Hughes was born in 1980 in Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire, U.K., and is of Welsh background. Her mother was the potter Elizabeth Fritsch. Hughes took up the cello and pursued the instrument for some years before switching to singing. She graduated from the Guildhall School of Music in London and went on as a cellist to the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich, switching to voice studies while she was there, earning concert and art song diplomas. Hughes finished her education at the Royal College of Music in London, studying with Lillian Watson and graduating in 2009. Winner of two of Britain's most prestigious career development awards, the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award and designation as a BBC New Generation Arts, she won a pair of prizes at the London Handel Singing Competition in 2009.

Soon, Hughes was finding operatic roles in England and beyond. Her debut came at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna in 2009 as Ruggiero in Rossini's Tancredi, but many of her early roles were in Baroque opera; she returned to the Theater an der Wien as both Fortuna in Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea and Euridice in that composer's Orfeo. Hughes has sung with many opera companies in Britain, including the English National Opera, the Garsington Opera, and the Scottish Opera. Her recording debut came in 2013 on the Fra Bernardo label with the Bach album Wie Freudig Ist mein Herz. In the mid-2010s, she often began to perform art song, making recital debuts at the Frick Collection in New York in 2015 with Drake as accompanist, and she appeared on the seventh volume of the Hyperion label's complete Richard Strauss song cycle that year. In 2017, she appeared at Carnegie Hall, singing a new song cycle she had commissioned from composer Huw Watkins. In concert, she has sung under both conductors of traditional repertory, including Gianandrea Noseda, and specialists in historical performance, such as Hervé Niquet and Philippe Herreweghe. Hughes signed with the BIS label and released the Baroque chamber album Heroines of Love and Loss in 2017. In 2021 she joined Middleton for the recital album Songs for New Life and Love, featuring music by Mahler, Ives, and Helen Grime. ~ James Manheim, Rovi