Six of the best young opera singers 

First it was the policeman who seemed to get younger every year. Then it was the conductors. Now it’s the opera singers. Or perhaps it’s not that they are getting younger, but that we can spot them sooner.

Special schemes to nurture them are busting out all over: just a few are the Jette Parker Young Artists at Covent Garden, the Young Singers Programme at English National Opera; and the doughty Classical Opera Company, in which select newcomers can cut their teeth. Additionally, contests like the Cardiff Singer of the World (which is heavily televised), and Plácido Domingo’s Operalia often provide launching pads.

Perhaps it’s even more crucial that the casting directors of opera festivals such as Garsington and Wexford, not to mention Glyndebourne, keep a sharp ear open for the hottest young talents. Wexford, for instance, has helped to launch such stars as Juan Diego Flórez and Joseph Calleja. Come to think of it, Calleja himself is still only 34.

In the past year or so I’ve come across enough gifted young singers to fill a dozen articles like this. But here are six of the best: all of them under 35, without glitzy record companies behind them, but with reputations that are starting to skyrocket.

I hope you come love to them as much as I do.

Sophie Bevan, 28, soprano

A young lyric soprano whose breadth of musicality and mature tone belie her youthful years, Bevan comes from a large musical family and has often appeared singing with her sister, Mary, who is also a promising soloist. She has enchanted audiences at Garsington as Mozart’s Susanna (The Marriage of Figaro) and Pamina (The Magic Flute), and will be making her debut in her namesake role, Sophie, in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier at English National Opera when it opens on 28th January.

Pumeza Matshikiza, 32, soprano

Born in the Western Cape, Matshikiza worked her way up from a difficult childhood in the townships of apartheid South Africa. The composer Kevin Volans arranged an audition for her at the Royal College of Music and paid for her flight; she duly won a scholarship. A radiant, rich-toned soprano, she has been a Jette Parker Young Artist at the ROH and performed at the Wigmore Hall with the Classical Opera Company; she’s currently on contract at the Stuttgart Opera. Oh, and she sang in Trafalgar Square to launch South Africa’s hosting of the World Cup.

Olesya Petrova, 29, mezzo-soprano

The Russian mezzo-soprano from St Petersburg lost out at last year’s Cardiff Singer of the World to a soprano – too often the fate of duskier female voices. Likewise, she has taken second prizes at both the Tchaikovsky Competition and the Galina Vishnevskaya Competition – but her gorgeous, focused tone and heady musicality meant I wasn’t the only one rooting for her at Cardiff. Now, her international career is beginning to gather pace: this year she’ll be singing Konchakovna in Borodin’s Prince Igor with the Zurich Opera.


Rafal Bartminski, 34, tenor

What was that about Wexford? Bartminski stole a startlingly convincing show there last year when he appeared in Maria, by Roman Statkowski, in which he played Waclaw, the young revolutionary hero in a striking production updated to the days of Solidarnosc. Praised by The Telegraph as ‘outstanding... plangent in his soft singing and thrilling at the top’, he proved ardent, versatile and powerful. A natural romantic, he has a strong national career at home in Poland. I hope his performance at Wexford has signalled the start of greater international acclaim.

Jacques Imbrailo, 33, baritone

This South African baritone wowed Glyndebourne when he starred as Britten’s Billy Budd in 2012. He’s a multiple award winner – at the Cardiff Singer of the World contest in 2007 he scooped the audience prize – and he’s been through the ROH’s Jette Parker scheme. Unusually, he started out as a rather amazing boy soprano: you can still find a YouTube clip of him singing a Queen of the Night aria from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte before his voice broke.

Iestym Davies, 32, counter-tenor

Counter-tenors can be an acquired taste, but an increasing number of Iestyn Davies fans are acquiring that taste very quickly. A former Cambridge chorister, he still bears traces of that training in the purity and precision of his tone, but there’s a joyfulness, passion and imagination in his singing that mark him out as something special: he has already won Young Artist of the Year at the Royal Philharmonic Awards. Andreas Scholl has popularised counter-tenors; now there’s a whole new generation of them, and Davies is at its forefront.

Jessica Duchen is a music journalist for The Independent. You can follow her on Twitter @JessicaDuchen.

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