AliceCoote

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Mezzo-Soprano
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News

  • 30 April 2024

    Royal Opera 2024/25 season to feature 22 Askonas Holt artists

    Read full article
  • 16 April 2024

    Askonas Holt welcomes mezzo-soprano Alice Coote

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Press

  • Mahler - Symphony No. 3 | London Philharmonic Orchestra

    Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre
    Nov 2023

    • Alice Coote looked round the audience imperiously before transporting us to a higher level with a truly magnificent rendition of Nietzsche’s ‘O Mensch! Gib Acht!’, a warning to us all in these turbulent times. Whether soft or loud, this was an exemplary performance and a privilege to have heard. Her sound was always beautiful, German diction clear and perfect, emotion compelling.

    • ... It was wonderful partly because you could see each new thought in the poem prefigured in Alice Coote's expressive face, before she sung it with spine-chilling quiet fervour.

  • Handel - Jephtha (Storgè)

    The Royal Opera House
    Nov 2023 - Nov 2023

  • Berlioz - Les Troyens (Cassandra) | Monteverdi Choir & Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique

    Royal Albert Hall
    Sep 2023

    • To be a pitch of desparate doom-laden foreboding for an hour and half is a superhuman challenge for a singer, but Alice Coote rose to it magnificently ... putting everyone else in the shade.

    • Part one is dominated by Cassandra, the truth-teller who prompts the Trojan women to kill themselves. Alice Coote, commanding the stage with fervour, both vocal and physical, mesmerised and enthralled. If she has sounded more convincing in a role, I can’t recall which.

    • Cassandra, doomed to see the future but unable to change it, drives the first two acts, and Alice Coote was remarkable in the role, thrilling with urgency and anguish.

    • Alice Coote, with the more dramatic sound, took Cassandra right to the edge, supercharging her fateful predictions with electricity.

    • Part 1 of Les Troyens has a vibrant theatrical pulse thanks to the dominant presence of Cassandre, the seer, whose prophesies steer the drama through to the Trojan Horse and beyond. The role needs a singer of presence and power, and in Alice Coote we got one. The prodigious mezzo-soprano has seldom sounded more glorious than she did here...

    • Dominating the first two acts is neither the heroine Dido nor the hero Aeneas but the clairvoyant goddess Cassandra, unfairly marginalised as a doom-mongering madwoman in the Aeneid, but given a key role by Berlioz. Alice Coote, as regal of tone and bearing as if she had been playing Dido herself, held the stage compellingly for a full hour.

    • Coote instantly asserted her authority with velvety nuanced tones, fully mining the sense of foreboding and premonition in the text.

    • But from the moment she came on, delivering her first lines from the midst of the orchestra, it was clear that these first two acts were Alice Coote's. Her Cassandre was mesmerising; sung with great focus and clarity, every word counted and Coote's declamation was superb.

  • Elgar - The Dream of Gerontius (Angel) | The Hallé

    Bridgewater Hall
    Jun 2023

    • Aiding his path to God was Alice Coote's angel, whose glorious voice offered balm and wisdom to us all.

    • Among the soloists, most impressive was Alice Coote’s Angel, a role she has performed on many occasions with this orchestra, not least at the Proms and on disc. She captured a sense of both benevolent warmth and reverential devotion in Part 2, singing with utmost control and beauty of sound as well as careful attention to the drama of the text. Her first Alleluia was magically gentle, while her tremblingly pianissimo (and yet stark) confirmation that Gerontius would soon come before God was strikingly haunting.

  • The Rebellious Recital

    Wigmore Hall
    May 2023

    • Joni Mitchell’s Borderline – ‘Every notion we subscribe to / Is just a borderline’ – could have been the credo of the whole evening, and Coote was both heart-rending and acute with Mitchell’s poetry. Costello and Bacharach’s My Thief, a song as complex and emotional as any lied, was compelling...Few do desolate as well as Coote and, back in the 19th century, Hahn’s L’heure exquise and Tchaikovsky’s My Genius, My Angel, My Friend were both beautifully soaked in it. The night finished with a kind of consolatory quartet: Bach’s Bist du bei mir, Brel’s My Death, Lennon’s Imagine and Strauss’s Morgen. There surely isn’t another singer who could have pulled it off.

    • Given Coote is an artist very much at the peak of her considerable powers, she has surely earned the right to sing what she likes. And this recital showed that taking risks can pay off – handsomely.

    • Coote is one of the great communicators, and we were not disappointed – indeed, the whole evening was an exercise in demonstrating how...a singer can keep the audience engaged through gesture, through eye contact, and expression.

  • Elgar - The Dream of Gerontious (Angel) | The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra

    Symphony Hall, Birmingham
    Mar 2023

    • Mezzo-soprano Alice Coote remains the Angel of choice, affecting, comforting.

    • ...Alice Coote's contribution as the Angel. Less imperious than many predecessors (or contemporaries), the extent of her involvement only deepened as Part Two unfolded - the restraint, even reticence, of My work is done taking on heightened eloquence during There was a Mortal, before the Softly and gently of her farewell brought with it a transfiguring radiance as carried through to the close. This was a thoughtful and, increasingly, affecting approach to some of this work's musical highpoints.

  • Poulenc - Dialogues des Carmélites (Madame de Croissy)

    The Metropolitan Opera
    Jan 2023 - Jan 2023

    • Mezzo-soprano Alice Coote, as Mother Superior Madame de Croissy, thrummed with a dark intensity from the moment she came on stage. Her face and body contorted, wracked with discomfort that rose to agony, this was an utterly vanity-free acting showcase for Coote, matched by an intense and riveting vocal performance that was unafraid to dig into the nastier side of de Croissy. I found her intensely moving in her anger and pain.

    • There are larger, more prominent roles than that of the old nun, Madame de Croissy, the dying Mother Superior of the order, but none has her impact in a brilliantly written death scene that is simply harrowing. Mezzo Alice Coote pulled out all the stops in a dramatic performance that will long stay with me--certainly the best she has ever been in my experience at the Met. It is the opera's sole show-stopping set piece (except for the ending) and, following a list of grand women who have sung the role, Coote certainly did (more than) justice to it.

    • “Relevez-vous” featured the most glorious singing from Coote the entire evening with tenderness in every note. Even the fortes throughout this passage lacked the harder edge that was more present in the sections bookending this passage. When Javelinot entered to warn the Prioress of her impending doom, Coote’s voice lost all of its brightness, the mezzo’s sound harsh, her body flailing all over the bed as she fought to survive. It was a gripping experience and one of the most intense I have witnessed on the Met stage.

    • The Old Prioress, who precedes Lidoine as the order’s Mother Superior, comes to a grisly end early in the opera, with a bang-up death scene that some singers approach with Meryl Streep-like meticulousness. Alice Coote gave an intense performance, more in-the-moment than grandly stylized, her nervy mezzo taking on the growl of a woman whose ox-like strength only prolonged her agony.

    • Coote is age-appropriate for Madame de Croissy according to the libretto; Constance irreverently declares that at 59, is it not time for her to die? Coote, however, is far younger than most singers who are cast in the role, and her relative youthfulness brought a fascinating dynamic to it. This was a vital woman in the prime of life, rather than a woman whose life force is all but spent. That difference made Madame de Croissy’s death scene all the more harrowing.

    • Alice Coote made a ferocious first impression as Madame de Croissy, the old prioress whose agonizing death presages the horrors visited upon the convent. Haughty and dismissive in her initial audience with Blanche, Coote’s Mother Superior touchingly softened at the recognition of the young girl’s misguided but sincere convictions. Although still vocally refulgent, she brought a chilling vulnerability to her character’s painful demise, underscoring the terror that accompanies a loss of faith in your darkest hour.

  • Ravel - Shéhérazade | Sinfonia of London

    Barbican Centre
    Dec 2022

    • Alice Coote’s fervent performance, the way she made the heart-stricken disappointment of the final song melt into sensuous languor was a lesson in how a great performance can turn copper into gold.

    • Ravel’s luscious song cycle Shéhérazade was sung superbly by Alice Coote. Some performers present these three sensuous songs in veiled, breathy timbres. Coote’s approach is far more incisive and intense in its response to the words, with reserves of power unleashed sparingly but with thrilling effect. She is always engaged emotionally. When she is also focused technically she is peerless.

  • Purcell - Dido and Aeneas (Dido)

    Royal Albert Hall
    Jul 2022

    • …fully in the spirit of a superbly evocative night, the mezzo-soprano’s intense theatricality won through, and that final lament struck us in all the right places.