Elizabeth Watts

British soprano Elizabeth Watts sings Zerlina (Don Giovanni) for The Royal Opera in the 2013/14 Season. Watts made her Royal Opera debut in October 2009 as Mandane (Artaxerxes) for The Royal Opera in the Linbury Studio Theatre and has since returned to sing Marzelline (Fidelio).

Watts grew up in Norwich, where she was a girl chorister at the cathedral. She graduated from Sheffield University with a First in Archeology, and went on to study singing at the Royal College of Music. Soon after graduating she won the Rosenblatt Recital Song Prize in the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition and the Kathleen Ferrier Award. She was a member of English National Opera’s Young Singers’ Programme 2005–7. Her operatic appearances since have included Susanna (Le nozze di Figaro) for Santa Fe Opera and Welsh National Opera, Pamina (Die Zauberflöte) and Fiordiligi (Così fan tutte) for WNO, Almirena (Rinaldo) for Glyndebourne on Tour and Serpetta (La finta gardiniera) on tour to the Barbican and the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris.

Watts sings regularly in concert with orchestras and ensembles including The English Concert, Philharmonia, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra and Royal Philharmonic Orcehstra, in repertory ranging from Haydn’s Scena di Berenice to Mahler’s Symphony no.4. Her contemporary repertory includes Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments. Her recordings include a disc of Schubert Lieder with Roger Vignoles, Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem, a disc of Strauss Lieder for Hyperion and a recording of Bach arias and cantatas for Harmonia Mundi.