| MAUREEN
BRATHWAITE (soprano) studied at the Guildhall School of
Music and Drama where she won the Anna Instone Memorial and
the Ian Fleming Awards. Operatic engagements have included
Frasquita in Bizet’s Carmen and Fire/Nightingale in
Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges for
Glyndebourne Festival and Touring Opera, Leila in Bizet’s Les
Pêcheurs de Perles for Opera Holland Park, the Sandman
and Dew Fairy in Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel for
Opera Northern Ireland and English National Opera, Adina in
Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore for Pegasus Opera,
the Flowermaiden in Wagner’s Parsifal for the BBC
Proms and at Le Châtelet Theatre, Paris, and Edna in Jonathan
Dove’s Tobias and the Angel for the Young Vic
Theatre. Also included are three Mozart roles – Despina in Così
fan tutte and Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni for
Welsh National Opera and Pamina in Die Zauberflote for
the Harare International Festival – and Maureen has also
played three different roles in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess
– Strawberry Woman for Glyndebourne, Clare at the Royal
Albert Hall and in Lisbon, and Lily for The Royal Opera House,
Covent Garden. She created the role of Vertu for the world
première of Micael Levinas’ Les Nègres at Lyon
Opera, Geneva Opera and Freiburg Opera.
Maureen’s
wide concert and oratorio repertoire ranges from Handel’s Messiah
and Haydn’s The Creation through the Mozart masses to
Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, the requiems of Brahms,
Fauré and Verdi, The Four Last Songs of Richard
Strauss, Britten’s War Requiem, Tippett’s A
Child of Our Time, the concert version of Porgy and
Bess and David Fanshawe’s African Sanctus. She
has worked with many leading orchestras and conductors
including Semyon Bychkov, Sir Mark Elder, Sir Charles
Mackerras, Sir Simon Rattle, Franz Brüggen, Andrew Litton and
Wayne Marshall, both as conductor and pianist in their
successful recital duo. Future plans include Porgy and Bess
with the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra.
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