Birmingham Conservatoire helped a midwife to become an opera star, writes Christopher Morley.
From a nursing career as a midwife to singing Brunnhilde in Wagner’s epic Ring cycle with one of Germany’s top opera companies is a step which probably only one person in the world has made, and that person is Catherine Foster.
Born in the East Midlands, Catherine played a variety of musical instruments during her schooldays, and sang in the local village church, becoming lead chorister at the age of 15.
“I’ve always had a passion for singing,” she tells me from her home in Weimar in Germany.
“As soon as I could talk I was singing, according to my mother! When I was around five years of age she couldn’t find me one Sunday morning, and after searching I was found standing in the aisle of the church singing Away in a Manger. It was the middle of July. . .”
But for all her delight in music, Catherine left college at the age of 18 with the required A & O-level examination passes that allowed her to commence training as a nurse.
“I progressed through my nursing career and became a midwife, she says. “But it was at this stage in my life that I started having singing tuition. Through my teachers I joined their amateur choir, singing at local venues, and so was born my love of opera.”
Some developing vocal problems led Catherine to change her singing teacher. She had the good fortune to be taken on by Pamela Cook, founder of Cantamus, the Mansfield-based girls’ choir which has achieved resounding success in competitions worldwide, and an extraordinary vocal technician in her own right.
“Pam is still my mentor and teacher today. I owe my whole career and where I am today to her teaching skills. In only a short period of time Pam could tell just how much I wanted to sing professionally, and in early 1995 she suggested the best way of doing this would be to follow the college route. She recommended me for an audition at Birmingham Conservatoire, and I was given a place on their undergraduate course.
“I thoroughly enjoyed my two years at the Conservatoire as I gained my BMus degree. It was a very friendly, safe, environment bridging the way between my two careers and giving me the opportunity to change my way of thinking. While I was at the Conservatoire I won the Dame Eva Turner Award, which enabled me to take a post-grad course at the Royal Northern College of Music, where I studied for one year.”
Catherine describes how during her first three years of study (two of those in my performance and theory classes at Birmingham Conservatoire) she worked from Monday to Friday in the colleges, and travelled back to Nottingham at weekends to work as a midwife at the City Hospital, in order to fund her way through her studies.
Another piece of good fortune intervened when she was introduced to Peter Moores in Manchester. The arts-loving philanthropist, who has a passion for opera, offered to sponsor her studies to enable her to stop working as a midwife.
“The Peter Moores Foundation sponsorship enabled me to have a year at the London Opera Studio in 1998/99 and sponsored me for a further month in Pesaro in Italy at the Rossini Festival with Alberto Zedda.”
Catherine’s next move was to Welsh National Opera, as she explains: “In 1997 in Birmingham I entered a competition and was invited by Welsh National Opera to audition for the role of Queen of the Night in Mozart’s Magic Flute.
“I was successful and performed the role in their 1999 production. I also performed this role with Opera Northern Ireland in 1998 and for English National Opera in 2000.
“I had a couple of smaller jobs at WNO after this, and I remember this period as a lot of hard work and disappointments. After many failed auditions it was obvious that I was going to have to do something drastic if I were to follow my dream.
“Eventually I was advised to go to Germany and get a contract singing lead roles in a decent provincial company to gain the experience I needed. So that was it, my mind was made up – it had to be Germany! Not speaking the language, I just photocopied pages and pages of agents’ addresses and tele-phone numbers, as I had no idea who to call, and went home to take my pick!
“I made a CD and then posted off over 100 letters and CDs to agents in Germany. I received about seven answers and then invitations to sing for about five agents, but as it turned out I only needed one and that was the one that for some reason I felt I had to sing for, in Düsseldorf.”
This happened in 2000, when Catherine had just married, and had reached the end of her savings. So it really was Germany or bust. She gives an interesting account of the audition process she went through.
“After the Düsseldorf audition, with the second audition, in Weimar, I got the job on the spot! It’s so hard for singers to prove themselves in an audition as it is such an unreal situation, but for new singers with no work there is no other way. How do you make yourself stand out and not just vocally?
“One thing I did start to do after getting my job in Weimar was to stop wearing black. Everyone wears black. The further I’ve gone in my career, the less the singers wear black, they have found their individualism.
“If black is worn then there is something extra to distinguish that singer, such as a coloured scarf or extravagant jewellery, and that is what I think needs to brought out in an audition, your individualism, for the panel to remember you. Don’t forget, they may be auditioning 20 people or more in one day.”
Whatever went on in Weimar, it obviously worked. Catherine was taken on and has since sung major Verdi, Puccini, Strauss and Wagner roles both there and elsewhere.
And now comes the big one, Brunnhilde, who appears in three of the four Ring operas. Catherine has performed the role in Weimar, as well as in Essen and Hamburg, and her appearance in the Weimar cycle has been preserved on an exciting set of DVDs from ArtHaus Musik.
And amidst all this, Catherine has returned to bringing babies into the world: this time her own one, Gabriella, born in 2003.
