April Cantelo, silver-voiced soprano who premiered Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – obituary
April Cantelo, who has died aged 96, was a gifted and versatile English soprano with a clear and silvery voice who rose from the Glyndebourne chorus and created the role of Helena in Benjamin Britten’s opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Aldeburgh Festival in June 1960; later she occupied a special place in the hearts of the nation’s younger singers, coaching several generations in technique, guiding their repertoire and encouraging their ambitions with helpful but honest advice.
Tall and imposing, April Cantelo drew praise for her interpretation of music both old and new. She sang Xantippe in the first professional British staging of Telemann’s Der geduldige Socrates for Kent Opera, conducted by Roger Norrington, in 1974, and Manon Lescaut in the British premiere of Hans Werner Henze’s Boulevard Solitude with the New Opera Company in 1962. She also gave a superb account of Jenny in the British premiere of Kurt Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogonny (1963), and appeared in the 1964 world premiere of Malcolm Williamson’s Edith Sitwell adaptation, English Eccentrics.
She made something of a speciality of Williamson’s operas, appearing as Beatrice Weston in his Graham Greene tale Our Man in Havana (1963); Berthe in his lushly romantic The Violins of Saint-Jacques (1966), based on Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s book; and Swallow in a recording of his children’s opera The Happy Prince (1965) after the story by Oscar Wilde. While many criticised Williamson’s “pop opera” approach, she was impressed by the way he wrote with specific singers in mind. “The harmonic quality in his melodies brings out the best in people’s voices,” she told The Daily Telegraph in 1975.
Like many singers, April Cantelo found audience coughing to be a distraction, saying that the fear of doing so often made people cough more. Her advice for those afflicted was to slip out of the hall quietly, but if that was not possible she suggested a simple trick: “Breathe in quietly through the nose and then out, counting to 10: it takes that nervous feeling away.”
April Rosemary Cantelo was born in Purbrook, Hampshire, on April 2 1928, the daughter of Herbert Cantelo, an amateur cellist, and his wife Marie (née Abraham). She was educated at Chelmsford Girls School, sang Bach arias with the Chelmsford Festival Orchestra in 1947 and took piano lessons at the Royal College of Music in London.
Her early ambition was to be “a research scientist – medical type”, she told the Oakland Tribune in 1971. She played piano and sang in the church choir, but when someone suggested she attend a singing audition she thought “it was a very jokey thing”.
The audition was for Dartington Hall, a small arts college in Devon. “I was given six months with them and a lot of education, plus the opportunity to go back to scientific research if I didn’t like singing,” she said. Needless to say, she never returned – though, she said, “sometimes I have looked back and wondered… This is a strange life, an extension of ‘let’s pretend’, and it’s a long, hard grind upward.”
April Cantelo’s vocal talents were soon evident and she joined the National Opera Studio studying with Vilem Tausky. Her other teachers included Joan Cross and Imogen Holst, who recalled her as also being an excellent viola player. On one occasion there was a lot of extraneous noise going on behind her head during an orchestral rehearsal, “and without stopping, she turned round to see what it was, while still going on playing,” Imogen Holst wrote.
By 1948 April Cantelo was appearing with the New English Singers, the Deller Consort and Glyndebourne Festival Chorus. In the Glyndebourne orchestra that summer was the clarinettist and future conductor Colin Davis. They were married the following year, though she was the primary breadwinner during what he called the “amateur wilderness” of his early years.
“My career took off before his, because I was a young singer and there are more opportunities for a young singer than a young conductor,” she told the Daily Mail. “So he had to do his share of the babysitting, which was probably frustrating.”
Davis did not always help himself. Friends recalled how he once accompanied her to a rehearsal, where he sat and picked at his shoe throughout. Their struggles paid off, at least for him, when in 1957 he was offered the position of assistant conductor to the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
April Cantelo made her solo debut with the Glyndebourne company at the 1950 Edinburgh Festival as Echo in Ariadne auf Naxos, singing Strauss’s little arietta at the start of the piece with great charm, and as Barbarina in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro. The following year she appeared, again as Barbarina, on the Sussex stage. In 1953 she reprised her Echo there and also sang Blonde in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail.
By then she had made her first appearance at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, with a small role in The Magic Flute conducted by John Pritchard. She had also made her debut at the Aldeburgh Festival, playing a charming Rosetta in Arthur Oldham’s realisation of Thomas Arne’s 18th-century pastiche Love in a Village for the English Opera Group.
Her first appearance at the Proms was in the Proms premiere of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana in 1958 conducted by Basil Cameron. She returned to the Royal Albert Hall on a further nine occasions until 1973, singing in works such as Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral Symphony, Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été and a concert arrangement of Williamson’s Our Man in Havana. In 1967 she took part in the inaugural concert of the Purcell Room at the South Bank Centre, appearing for the Apollo Society with Raymond Leppard and Robert Tear in a programme appropriately entitled “Homage to Henry Purcell”.
During the 1970s April Cantelo’s career took her to Australia, often to appear in Williamson’s operas. She also held a visiting lectureship at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and in 1972 directed a staging there of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen.
April Cantelo slipped quietly off the stage, and in 1979 founded the Highnam Court Project with the conductor Roger Smith. Their plan was to turn the 17th-century mansion in Gloucestershire, once in the family of the composer Hubert Parry, into a foundation for the arts. Opera weekends were held there and in 1981 their restoration work was featured in an ATV documentary.
She settled in Oxfordshire, transforming the amateur villagers of All Saints Singers at Sutton Courtenay, near Abingdon, into a professional-sounding chorus. She even coaxed some of her professional colleagues to join the Singers as soloists in Haydn masses, Bach passions and Telemann oratorios.
Three years ago her portrait was painted by Ruth Swain, wearing a pink woollen hat and heavy beige coat, a walking stick in each of her gloved hands. The artist proposed giving it the title Soprano; April Cantelo replied: “Better call it Lady With Two Sticks.”
April Cantelo’s marriage to Davis was dissolved in 1964 after he began a relationship with Ashraf Naini, known as Shamsi, their children’s Iranian au pair, whom he later married. He died in 2013. They had a daughter and a son.
April Cantelo, born April 2 1928, died July 16 2024