Kathryn Harries - Honorary President

Kathryn Harries is internationally renowned for the extraordinary breadth of her repertoire and for the dramatic intensity of her performances. After studying at the Royal Academy of Music with Constance Shacklock, she spent some years dividing her time between presenting the award-winning Television series `Music Time' (of which she recorded over 60 programmes and an associated LP) and a developing concert career. She made her Royal Festival Hall debut in 1977 since when she has been in considerable demand in repertoire ranging from Monteverdi to the 20th Century. She made her operatic debut in 1983 as Leonore in Beethoven's Fidelio for Welsh National Opera. Engagements in the UK since then have included roles in operas by Beethoven, Wagner, Bellini, Strauss, Mozart, Sawyer, Berlioz, Bartok and Berg, with companies including Covent Garden, Welsh National, English National, Scottish Opera, Opera North and Glyndebourne.

She made a sensational US debut in 1986 as Kundry in Wagner's The Flying Dutchman under James Levine at the Metropolitan Opera New York, and since then her international career has taken her to the Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco, the Lyon Berlioz and Orange Fesivals, Paris, Nice, Liege, Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam, Brussels, Geneva, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Linz, Bamberg, Tel Aviv and Berlin. In the course of these travels she has added to her repertoire roles in further operas by some of the composers listed above as well as by Bolcom, Bizet, Weill, Vivier, Shostakovich, Nono, Mascagni, Offenbach and Puccini. For the Easter Salzburg Festival in Berlin she sang Mrs Sedley in Britten's Peter Grimes with Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, and had an enormous success as the Kostelnicka in Jancek's Jenufa at the 2004 Glyndebourne Festival.

Kathryn Harries also appears regularly on the concert platform. Recent engagements have included Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, concerts with the English Northern Philharmonia, a recording of Brahms songs for BBC Radio 3, Der Neue Orpheus in the BBC Symphony Orchestra Weill weekend at the Barbican, and the role of Begbick in his The Rise and Fall of Mahagonny at the BBC Proms and in Bremen and Lucerne with the BBC Philharmonic. Future commitments include Gerard Barry's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant for English National Opera, Puccini's Les Dialogues des Carmelites in Hamburg and Bilbao, Kabanicha in Janacek's Katya Kabanova in Genoa, and the Kostelnicka in the same composer's Jenufa for the Angers Nantes Opera.