“The most strikingly successful element of the evening was Katie Bray’s fresh-faced and ingenuous Charlotte. Her olive-toned mezzo projects cleanly… Hers is a name to remember”. The Telegraph

Winner of the Dame Joan Sutherland Audience Prize at Cardiff Singer of the World 2019, British mezzo-soprano Katie Bray has become known for her magnetic stage presence and gleaming, expressive tone.

Roles for Opera North have included Hansel Hansel and Gretel, Rosina Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Varvara Katya Kabanova, Louis XV Chair/Female Cat/Owl L’enfant et les sortilèges, Lola Cavalleria Rusticana, and Nancy Albert Herring.

She has also sung with Irish National Opera in the title role, Griselda, English National Opera as Daughter Akhnaten and in The Way Back Home, Scottish Opera as Lucilla La Scala di seta, Welsh National Opera Zerlina, Don Giovanni, Opera Holland Park Mallika Lakmé, English Touring Opera Zenobia Radamisto, Minerva Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and Satirino La Calisto, Grimeborn Festival as Charlotte Werther, and with Garsington Opera as Zulma L’Italiana in Algeri, Zaida Il turco in Italia, and most recently Isolier Le Comte Ory, for which she received great acclaim. She also recently performed in a staged cabaret of ‘songs banned by the Nazis’, Effigies of Wickedness, at the Gate Theatre, Notting Hill, in collaboration with English National Opera.

Equally at home on the concert platform, Katie Bray has performed in prestigious venues such as the Wigmore Hall, Cadogan Hall, and the Holywell Music Room and she appears regularly in the London English Song Festival, where she has directed concerts at Wilton’s Music Hall, as well as at the Oxford Lieder Festival for which she recorded a disc of Schumann songs with Sholto Kynoch. Other recent highlights include a semi-staged version of Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch with Christopher Glynn and Roderick Williams at Milton Court Concert Hall and Ryedale Festival, and the premiere of new monodrama Frida with the East London Music Group.

Katie Bray is particularly noted for baroque repertoire and has appeared with Barokksolistene and Bjarte Eike, Monteverdi Choir and Sir John Eliot Gardiner, La Nuova Musica, Ludus Baroque, London Handel Orchestra and Laurence Cummings, Wroclaw Baroque Orchestra, and Spira Mirabilis. She has also appeared with orchestras including the Britten Sinfonia, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestre Chambre de Paris, and the Aalborg Symphony Orchestra.

Highlights include concerts at the Oxford Lieder Festival, Viardot200 Festival, and with the Irish Baroque Orchestra, with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Jac van Steen, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Peter Whelan, Messiah for the Hallé Orchestra, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at the Barbican and Rosina in The Barber of Seville in Garsington Opera’s 2023 Festival. Future plans include Nancy in Albert Herring for Opera North; a newly written composition by Freya Waley-Cohen's with Manchester Collective and an appearance at Grange Park Opera in 2024.

Katie Bray graduated as a Karaviotis Scholar from the opera course at the Royal Academy of Music, was awarded the Principal’s Prize and won First Prize in the Richard Lewis Singing Competition.

Photo credit: Tim Dunk