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Catherine Foster, star of six seasons at the Bayreuth festival, finally returns for performances in Britain where she used to work on hospital wards
Sorrow, joy, birth and death, love and hatred – opera covers it all, with a heavy emphasis on love and death. And for the acclaimed British Wagnerian soprano, Catherine Foster, there is no doubt where her understanding of these central human experiences stems from. The singer, who returns to Britain this spring to perform for the first time after a successful career in Germany, will be drawing heavily on her time as a nurse and midwife in her native Nottingham.
“We are all a collection of our experiences,” she said this weekend, before a performance of Richard Strauss’s expressionist opera Elektra with the Bournemouth Symphony under conductor Kiril Karabits. “And so, of course, working on the wards affected me.” Continue reading...