David Wilson-Johnson was educated at Wellingborough School, and studied Modern and Mediaeval Languages at St Catharine's College, Cambridge.
As a singer he studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he won the Dove Prize for most distinguished student.
David Wilson-Johnson was Professor of Singing at the Conservatory of Amsterdam from 2005 to 2010, and is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music.
He has worked with prominent conductors including Vladimir Ashkenazy, Frans Brüggen, Pierre Boulez, Charles Dutoit, Carlo Maria Giulini, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, André Previn, Sir Simon Rattle, Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, and Evgeny Svetlanov.
After the 9/11 attacks of 2001 he sang Beethoven's Ninth Symphony under Leonard Slatkin at the 2001 Last Night of the Proms to a worldwide audience of 340 million.