I think I’ve found the new Maria Callas

Some of my most enjoyable evenings, when I reviewed opera weekly for The Spectator, were spent at the Royal College of Music, in the tiny but elegant and comfortable Britten Theatre. The performers, onstage and in the pit, are mostly current students of the RCM, led by one or another expert but puzzlingly little-known conductor. Repertoire is reasonably adventurous, but Handel, Mozart, Britten are perhaps the backbone. One of the pleasures of those performances is spotting the singers that one is sure will go on to big operatic careers, if they choose to. I spent a lot of time doing that, and almost always got it wrong. You have to remember that voices that sound well there may not prosper in Covent Garden or other theatres of comparable proportions. The long slog of singing in short-lived travelling opera companies, or even long-lived ones, must be enough to deter all but the most resolute and determined artists. For whatever reasons, most of the singers for whom I confidently predicted a big career have now disappeared without trace.

A decade ago, the singer whose performances at the RCM I most looked forward to, and about whom I wrote in terms that must have suggested either obsession or corruption, was the young South African soprano Pumeza Matshikiza. I saw her as Mozart’s Countess in Le Nozze di Figaro, Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte, as Poppea in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, as Concepcion in Ravel’s bawdy L’heure espagnole, and in many other roles. What initially arrested me, and went on fascinating me, was not only the beauty of her singing, one of the loveliest lightish lyric sopranos I have heard in the flesh, but also her commitment to the role she was performing.