American soprano Anne Sutton is a versatile young artist working as both a singer and opera director.
She was praised for her “bright and engaging” performance as a soloist in Bach’s St. John Passion with the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and she recently made her Wigmore Hall debut as the soprano soloist in extracts from Bach’s B Minor Mass with Rachel Podger. She was a 2022 Associate Artist at Nevill Holt Opera and won second place and the early music prize in the AESS Patricia Routledge National English Song Competition. As a stage director and assistant director, Anne has worked at Richmond Opera, Opera Neo, Devon Opera, University of Cambridge, the Guildhall School, the Royal Academy of Music, the Berlin Opera Academy, the Halifax Summer Opera Festival, the Peabody Institute, and the Maryland Opera Studio.
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Anne cultivates a diverse array of interests as a singer and works across the classical vocal spectrum: from choral singing to opera, and from early music to contemporary commissions. She is one of the founding members of the Londinium Consort, a new ensemble dedicated to bridging the gap between early and contemporary music that recently made its Brighton Festival debut. She was an Emerging Artist Fellow at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, a Voces8 UK Scholar, and has performed with leading choral groups in the UK in venues including the Royal Albert Hall (BBC Proms), the Southbank Centre, Cadogan Hall, and the UK Houses of Parliament. She appeared in recital with the North Carolina Historically Informed Performance Festival and was a finalist in the New Elizabethan Competition with lutenist and guitarist Emanuele Addis.
On the opera stage, Anne was a company member for the National Gilbert and Sullivan Opera’s Summer 2023 Season. Her recent roles include Sophie (Werther) and Sophie (Der Rosenkavalier) with Royal Academy Opera Scenes, Morgana (Alcina) with the Chicago Summer Opera Festival (Covid-19), La Fée (Cendrillon) and Second Woman (Dido and Aeneas) with University of North Carolina Opera, Lucy (The Telephone) with U-Vermont Opera, and 1st Spirit (Die Zauberflöte) with the Opera Company of Middlebury. She has performed in masterclasses with Felicity Lott, Lawrence Brownlee, and Mark Padmore, among others, and won first place in the North Carolina division of the NATS (National Association of Teachers of Singing) competition.
Anne often draws upon her affinity for research to curate unique concert experiences. She recently created the Opera by American Women Workshop, which explored unrecorded works of the first female American opera composers. She worked with singers at the Royal Academy of Music to stage excerpts from these operas, including a scene from Amy Beach’s unpublished Cabildo. She culminated this project by directing Mabel Wheeler Daniels’ operetta, A Copper Complication (1900) in the work’s historic UK premiere. Other recent projects include a lecture-recital of rarely performed medieval songs by Guillaume de Machaut in which she examined their categorization and performance practices. Anne was a grant recipient of the Tom and Elizabeth Long Excellence Fund, the Mildred Brown Mayo Research Fund, and the Robinson Honors Research Fellowship to create a lecture-recital following the life and career of Handelian soprano Faustina Bordoni, and she travelled in the U.K. and Italy to explore the guiding question of how singers influence composition. As a part of this project, Anne created a modern score of extracts from Attilio Ariosti’s Lucio Vero written for Bordoni in 1727, later performing them in the US.
She completed her Masters at the Royal Academy of Music in London where she was a Marshall Scholar. After finishing her degree, she was a ‘22/23 Opera Directing Fellow at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Anne did her undergraduate studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, receiving both a Bachelor of Music and a Bachelor of Arts in Geography.