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Elizabeth Watts
(Sopranos)
Press:
Catch her if you can - Artaxerxes
The ROH has assembled a very decent cast, from which Elizabeth Watt's dazzling Mandane - brilliant in her famous solos, Fly, soft ideas, fly and The soldier tir'd of war's alarms - stands out. Hers is the most vividly drawn character, and she grasps her histrionic opportunities greedily, steaming with indignant rage.
Hugh Canning, The Sunday Times, 08 November 2009
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The Marriage of Figaro - English National Opera
“The stars of the show are Sarah Tynan, fresh and believably proper as Susanna, and Elizabeth Watts, a delightful Barbarina.”
David Gutman, The Stage, 8 February 2007
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The Marriage of Figaro / English National Opera
“Elizabeth Watts was a delightful, and stylish, Barbarina.”
Peter Reed, The Sunday Telegraph, 28 January 2007
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Wigmore Hall, 20 March 2010
Elizabeth Watts waiting for the finale — and she sang her angel song with wide-eyed radiance, and a ripe sense of the joys of Heaven.
Watts’s performance of David Matthews’s 2005 arrangement of Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été was the centrepiece — and tour de force — of the evening. The new slender orchestration is entirely faithful to the essence of Berlioz’s sound world and Watts gave a performance that was outstanding in every way: in its beautifully idiomatic French and its long lines of melody whose legato arose as much from a continuity of thought and imagination as of vocal tone. The harsh, dark undertow of bass, cello, viola and horn in Sur les lagunes coloured Watts’s own impressive low register. And rarely have I heard such an anguished yet perfectly focused cry of “Reviens!” in Absence.
Hilary Finch, The Times, 23 March 2010
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Elizabeth Watts at Wigmore Hall, 09 June 2010
Last-minute substitutions for an absentee artist can, on occasion, cause a sensation, and anyone who heard this recital, in which Elizabeth Watts replaced Dorothea Röschmann to join Christopher Maltman and Roger Vignoles for an all-Strauss programme, is unlikely to forget it. Watts, winner of the lieder prize at Cardiff Singer of the World in 2007, is already a major artist. But this struck me as marking a transformation from a good singer into a great one, as well as allowing us to hear her in music she seems to have been born to sing.
Watts has the right tonal glamour for Strauss, along with that tricky combination of vocal ease and immaculate control that his work requires. She also has a nice way with words, so that the suggestiveness of songs such as Leises Lied and Wiegenlied was ecstatically entwined with their hovering vocal lines.
In a concert that breached several areas of Straussian convention, she gave us part of Krämerspiegel, his bitter 1918 satire on the venality of the music publishing business. The cycle is usually performed by men: to hear a soprano in it is to be aware of the sensuality that lurks beneath the vindictiveness.
Maltman, meanwhile, also has the right combination of allure and drama for Strauss, and was just as revelatory. Performances of songs in Strauss's own groupings are now rare, though he gave us the Op 15 set complete, making perfect sense of its melancholy passion. Later on came Am Ufer, full of breathtaking high pianissimos. And Vignoles, sensitive and insightful as always, reminded us just how fine Strauss's sometimes overlooked piano writing really is.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/jun/11/watts-maltman-vignoles-review
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Contact Details: Thomas Hull
th@ingpen.co.uk
+44(0)20 8874 3222
+44(0)20 8877 3113
Artist Biography
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