New Artist of the Month: Soprano Catharine Woodward

Wagnerian voices take time to mature, and even when they do, the lead roles tend to be monopolized by a handful of established stars. It was therefore both a surprise and a pleasure earlier this year to encounter a fully formed Brünnhilde giving her all in an orchestrally pared-down Götterdämmerung staged in a former boxing ring in London’s East End.

Catharine Woodward’s performance for Regents Opera was “touching, complex, and utterly tireless,” as I wrote in my review.  “Her top notes were thrilling, the volume substantial, and her text impressively audible. On this hearing, she’s a singer clearly going places.”

That judgement was borne out by a little post-production research. This summer she returns to the Bayreuth Festival to sing Gerhilde, one of Brünnhilde’s Valkyrie sisters. Meanwhile, she’s covering the same role in Barrie Kosky’s staging of Die Walküre at the Royal Ballet and Opera. Early next year she will be covering Malin Byström as Isolde for Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam.

Born into a moderately musical family in Highbury, North London, Woodward is 45, the perfect age to take on the heroines in Wagner’s mature operas. But although music was a passion from an early age, her career path has had plenty of kinks and curves. “As a child I was noisy and not very talented,” she admits, chatting over Zoom from her London hotel. “I wanted to be a pop star really, but I went to see Prince when I was 12 and realized I couldn't be him, which I found quite distressing.”

The same year she added her name to a sign-up sheet at school. The prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama was looking for fairies for Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night's Dream and Woodward landed the role of Peaseblossom. “I never looked back,” she laughs. “I told everyone I was going to be an opera singer and have done so ever since.”

Determined to acquire more experience, she auditioned successfully for conductor Ronald Corp’s New London Children's Choir, but when higher education beckoned, she hesitated. “In the end I went to Durham University to study music because I knew my voice wasn't anywhere near okay,” she says. “They were much more in need of a double bass player there than a soprano with slightly too much personality.”

On graduating, she landed a job at BBC Radio 1, the U.K. national broadcaster’s flagship pop channel. Three years of private singing lessons later she took the plunge with a postgraduate diploma in vocal studies at London’s Trinity Laban followed by a stint at the Alexander Gibson Opera School at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

Early Days

Back then Woodward was dabbling in early music and Mozart. “I did a couple of Don Giovannis and things like that, but I never got the same role twice,” she explains. “I did a lot of side hustles, and I always had at least one or two roles a year that would keep me going. I did some lovely contemporary opera as well, with Highbury Opera Theatre.”

Eventually, in her 30s, she auditioned for Regents Opera (then known as Fulham Opera). “They offered me Alice Ford in Falstaff, and I fell in love with the conductor,” she smiles.

The man in question was Ben Woodward, co-founder of one of the U.K.’s most ambitious small-scale opera companies and conductor of their acclaimed Ring Cycle. Ben introduced Catharine to a new vocal coach, helping her tackle her first Mimì and Verdi roles like Elisabetta in Don Carlo and Leonora in La Forza del destino. From there, the logical next steps were the Wagner roles, even though it meant a lot of grueling work.

“I've had to work on my technique in order to be good enough for them—I mean, they challenge you physically—but I've been lucky to go to the right teachers and coaches,” she shares. “The last piece of the puzzle was Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet, who sang Brünnhilde and stuff. I had one session with her, and she said, ‘Can I just put your jaw in the right place?’ It was the magic bullet that made everything suddenly a lot easier.”

The Bayreuth opportunity came out of the blue after, unbeknownst to her, the head of music at Woodward’s old school recommended her to conductor Simone Young. She remembers the audition vividly. “Out of the darkness they would say ‘Frau Wagner wants this; Frau Wagner wants that,’” she recalls. “It was snowing outside, and the theater was absolutely freezing, so I wore an oversized neon-orange jumper to keep warm. I sang excerpts from the Ring, and then they asked me for Brünnhilde’s Battle Cry.”

These days Catharine and Ben live in Berlin, happily co-parenting a cat named Kira. It’s also home to Catharine’s favorite vocal coach, American pianist Gary Gromis. “He’s now retired but he says he doesn't mind working with me because I always bring fun rep,” she says. “He's extremely exacting—I mean, I can barely get through a syllable—but he worked a lot with Sawallisch when he was young and coached Hildegard Behrens for a long time, so there’s this wonderful wealth of input into the kind of things I want to sing.”

For Woodward, the dream role is Richard Strauss’s Elektra. “I love her,” she says. “I have 90 percent of the role [under my belt] already, so I kind of want to get that done.”

Meanwhile, as she immerses herself in heavier roles, how can she ensure that she has 15 years of first-class Wagner singing ahead? “I’m an absolute gym avoider, so I definitely need to work harder at that,” she laughs. “But really, it's just a case of staying fit, sleeping enough, and drinking enough water.”

_{Photo by Tom Medwell}