Howard Crook (June 15, 1947 – August 27, 2024) was an American lyric tenor who lived and worked in the Netherlands and France beginning in the early 1980s.
Crook was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, and educated at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, and then University of Illinois, where he received a master's degree in music, specialising in opera.
He worked in theatre and mime for a few years before becoming a professional singer after winning second prizes in the vocal competitions of Paris and 's-Hertogenbosch.
Crook began to specialize in early music and performed and recorded with the leading conductors in that field; he performed in Leclair's Scylla et Glaucus, Berlioz's Les nuits d'été and Bach's St Matthew Passion with John Eliot Gardiner; with Trevor Pinnock, Handel's Messiah and with Roger Norrington, Henry Purcell's The Fairy-Queen.
Crook sang the solos in the large-scale works of Bach and the major tenor roles in most of the operas of Lully, Rameau, Haydn and Mozart.