CityLife

Arts: Kathryn Rudge interview

Kathryn Rudge in Carmen

Read about Kathryn Rudge on Twitter, and what do you find?

‘Mezzo-soprano singer from Liverpool, LFC supporter’.
 
That’s her all right. The 24-year-old opera singer, one of the starriest performers to have emerged from the Royal Northern College of Music recently, is Liverpudlian through and through.

“I’m a Liverpool girl, born and bred, and at heart, too,” she says.
 
Mum and dad were not specially musical – though they’re immensely proud of her and have supported her all the way.

But she always wanted to be a performer – “I used to do little shows for my family,” she says, and “and when I was about seven I remember asking if I could sing a solo in the school nativity play!”

She asked to learn to play the piano, too, and when she was 13 and at Liverpool College she began singing lessons with RNCM-trained Polly Beck.

Soon she was coming over to Manchester on Saturdays to the Junior Royal Northern College of Music, and she saw her first opera aged 16. It was Carmen, at the Liverpool Empire.

“That really got me started – thinking I’d love to perform that one day,” she says.

She already has: she took the title role in the RNCM’s own production a few months ago.

“The training was hugely inspirational, and I made so many friends,” she says. “Saturdays were so much fun, and I got lots of experience of rec­itals when I was very young.”

She came to the RNCM full-time and continued with postgraduate work and then as one of the first recipients of its International Artists’ Diploma, and she has had fantastic reviews for roles as diverse as Cherubino, the teenage boy in Mozart’s Marriage Of Figaro, Olga in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Erika in Barber’s Vanessa, and, of course, Carmen.

Her teacher for seven years now has been Susan Roper, who she says has ‘always been there for me and very supportive: she’s just brilliant’.

She’s won a host of national and local awards and prizes, and begun a concert career, too. She’s made a string of appearances already with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, beginning with big open-air events conducted by Carl Davis, who she says was ‘a great mentor’. She is in recital at the Chester Festival on July 4 (St Mary’s Centre, 1pm), at the Wigmore Hall in London the following Monday, and back in Chester for the Festival Finale with the RLPO in the Cathedral on July 16.

And in the autumn she’s got her first big break professionally, as Cherubino in The Marriage Of Figaro with English National Opera in London.

But before all that she is in the RNCM’s own exciting end-of-year concert tonight at the Bridgewater Hall, singing American folk song arrangements by Aaron Copland, with the college symphony orchestra under the baton of Yan Pascal Tortelier.

It should be quite a night.

>>It’s a busy musical weekend generally, with Stockport Symphony Orchestra and soloist Leland Chen in Bruch’s first violin concerto tomorrow night at Stockport town hall. Richard Davis also conducts Mahler’s fifth symphony.

>>At Gorton Monastery in Manchester tomorrow, too, St George’s Singers perform works by Hungarian, Czech and Polish composers, and there are songs from tenor Richard Dowling (by Dvorak) and a harp sonata played by Louise Thomson.

>>The Hallé Choir and Hallé Children’s Choir open the 2011 Hallé Promenade Concerts at the Bridgewater Hall on Sunday, as Timothy Redmond conducts them and the Hallé Orchestra in The Greatest Choruses In The World. And on Wednesday at the Bridgewater Hall, harpsichordist extraordinary Trevor Pinnock, and Friends, play Purcell, Bach, and in Handel arias sung by Miah Persson.