The Interview

BBC Music Magazine
August 2019

‘I’m pretty sure I leaped up and started doing a crazy dance,’ laughs American mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton when she recalls the moment she was invited to headline this summer’s Last Night of the Proms. ‘It was the most amazing feeling, quite honestly: to be invited along to any part of the Proms is an absolute honour, but the Last Night – I mean, I knew about this thing called the “Last Night of the Proms” long before I knew what the Proms even was, so it truly is a dream come true.’

Barton would be the first person to admit that her stellar career trajectory is rather unlikely: at just 37, she is already the Wagnerian mezzo of choice for many of the world’s leading houses, including New York’s Metropolitan Opera, where her recent turn as Fricka in the Ring cycle had critics raving about her ‘lustrous tones’ and ‘marvellous’ performance. Yet Barton grew up far away from the rarefied world of gilded opera houses and iconic concert stages…

Read the full interview in the August issue of BBC Music Magazine!