Alice Coote Mezzo-soprano
Alice Coote sings lieder, oratorios and opera, often as an interpreter of so-called ‘trouser roles’. Her solo discs have included Handel arias plus song cycles by Mahler and Schubert, and she has also recorded Elgar’s Sea Pictures with the Hallé. In 2018, Coote was awarded an OBE. Upcoming performance highlights include singing Orfeo in the English National Opera’s new production of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice and a solo recital at Wigmore Hall on 12 December.
Music filled the house when I was a child. My father was a painter and he used to play his hi-fi extremely loudly – the room used to shake – and he’d listen to a lot of jazz and classical music. Even as a tiny child I loved to hear Fred Astaire, especially in Cole Porter’s Night and Day. The lyrics inspired my interest in words and music from a young age. I used to sing the same songs over and over again when we were in the car on long journeys as a family. I’d pretend the seatbelt was a microphone. No matter how much my older sister and my mother would plead, there was no stopping me! I liked having a captive audience.
In 1975, I heard QUEEN’S Bohemian Rhapsody on the radio, and I distinctly remember the sound. Freddie Mercury had a large voice – powerful, dangerous and operatic – and it was something completely new. I was seven at the time and the song was number one for nine weeks, which meant I got to hear it regularly on the radio – every Sunday on the singles chart, which we’d listen to at bath time. I knew by then I wanted to be a singer.
As a teenager, I was introduced to DAVID BOWIE by my older brother. Bowie’s version of Brel’s My Death and the whole of the Ziggy Stardust album were a huge influence. The quality of Bowie’s voice and the power of his stage presence was intoxicating. By this point I was having singing lessons – and wearing blue lipstick and being a punk. All the raw materials required to be a performer were bursting out of me but I did not understand that at the time.
There was a pivotal moment when I started to understand the power of music. It was 1985 and I was at the Royal Albert Hall for a BBC Prom featuring MAHLER’S Das Lied von der Erde with soprano
Jessye Norman and tenor Jon Vickers, with Simon Rattle conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. I later bought the recording of contralto Kathleen Ferrier singing the same work with the Vienna Philharmonic under Bruno Walter. I knew that I wanted to sing but I found the college environment very hard and eventually dropped out. That recording helped me through the difficult times. I can still visualise the LP going round on a tiny player; when my roommate would go out I would put it on and cry for hours. To me, that piece encapsulates the philosophy of life.
I first heard baritone Dietrich Fischerdieskau’s recording of SCHUBERT’S Winterreise while on holiday in Scotland with my parents. My mother played the cassette on repeat. I loved the poetry and Fischer-dieskau’s voice – well, who doesn’t? I fell in love with Schubert and the sound of the great poems and went on to record some myself. I never would have imagined that – or, in fact, standing on the same stage that I’d seen Jessye Norman, as I did when I went on to sing Das Lied von der Erde at the BBC Proms in 2016.
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS’S The Lark Ascending provokes a very powerful memory of my childhood as I grew up in the middle of nowhere in Cheshire, and for me this piece sums up the sense of ‘music that changed me’. I used to watch the skylarks and I remember being so happy. There’s something about the version recorded by violinist Iona Brown, Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields – it’s the closest link between the reality of natural beauty and music’s interpretation of that. It also released and defined the singular English sensibility I cherish, and led me to the great English composers and the music I am still singing today.