Sarah Walker, mezzo-soprano

Sarah Walker began her musical life as a violinist at the Royal College of Music and subsequently studied singing with Vera Rozsa, with whom she has built up a wide repertoire ranging from Bach and Monteverdi to twentieth-century works by composers such as Berio, Boulez, Cage, Henze, Ligeti, Copland and Ives. She is much in demand on the concert platform worldwide, where she has worked with Ozawa, Davis, Mackerras, Solti, Norrington, Boulez, Rozhdestvensky, Tilson-Thomas, Masur, Harnoncourt and Rattle, and appears regularly with the major British orchestras, and at the major British and European festivals. Sarah Walker is closely associated with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where she has performed Baba the Turk (The Rake's Progress), Charlotte (Werther), Mrs Sedley (Peter Grimes) Sallinen's The King Goes Forth To France, Maxwell-Davies' Taverner, Le nozze di Figaro, and Handel's Samson. With English National Opera her many rôles include Mary Stuart, Charlotte, the Countess (The Queen of Spades), Cornelia (Julius Caesar), Britten's Gloriana and Katisha in The Mikado. She has sung Dido (Les Troyens) at the Vienna State Opera, Cornelia in Geneva, Ottavia and Cornelia in San Francisco, Magdalene in Chicago and Cornelia and Micah at the Metropolitan Opera. Her Glyndebourne début was as Diana in Cavalli's La Calisto and she has since sung Monteverdi's Ottavia, Penelope and Poppea. Sarah Walker has perhaps received the greatest critical acclaim for her recitals. Since the overwhelming success of her Wigmore Hall début she has visited all the major European cities and Festivals, the United States, Australia and New Zealand and has made numerous recordings. Sarah Walker was made a C.B.E in the 1991 Queen's Birthday Honours.