The soprano April Cantelo, who has died aged 96, excelled in music ranging from the baroque period to the contemporary, on stage and in the concert hall. She was involved in many premieres of new works.
Her operatic debut as a soloist came with the Glyndebourne festival company at the Edinburgh festival in 1950, singing Barbarina in Le Nozze di Figaro and Echo in Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos. These she repeated at the company’s base in Lewes, East Sussex, going on to add Blonde in Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1953), Marzelline in Fidelio (1963), and finally Erisbe in Cavalli’s L’Ormindo, directed by the composer’s great champion at Glyndebourne, Raymond Leppard, on the company’s first UK tour (1968-69).
In the early 1950s she made appearances at the Royal Opera House as Barbarina and the Countess Ceprano (Rigoletto), as well taking small parts in The Magic Flute and Massenet’s Manon. The 1952 Aldeburgh festival saw her star in Arthur Oldham’s new arrangement of Thomas Arne’s 1762 pasticcio, Love in a Village. At the Wexford festival she appeared in Rossini’s La Cenerentola (1956, as Clorinda) and Rossini’s L’italiana in Algeri (1957, as Elvira). The following year she sang in a staging of Theodora by the Handel Opera Society at St Pancras town hall, in London.
The most prominent of her operatic premieres was creating the role of Helena in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Aldeburgh in 1960. She took part in the first performances of several operas by Malcolm Williamson: as Beatrice in Our Man in Havana (1963), Miss Beswick in English Eccentrics (1964), Swallow in The Happy Prince (1965), as well as Ann in Julius Caesar Jones and Berthe in The Violins of Saint-Jacques (both in 1966) and a group of small roles in Lucky Peter’s Journey (1970).
Other premieres included Lennox Berkeley’s A Dinner Engagement (1954) and Ruth (1956), Amelia in Thomas Eastwood’s Christopher Sly (1960), and Gordon Crosse’s The Grace of Todd (1969), as well as the title-role of John Eccles’ Semele, composed in the early 18th century but not performed until 1972. Among several major UK premieres was the first professional UK production of Telemann’s Der Geduldige Socrates, given by Kent Opera in 1974.
Cantelo’s Prom appearances included Orff’s Carmina Burana, Vaughan Williams’ Pastoral Symphony, Haydn’s Nelson Mass, and works by Monteverdi, Cavalli, Purcell, Berlioz and Williamson.
Her recital programmes ranged from lute songs through the baroque to lieder and on to contemporary works. In 1967 she took part in the inaugural recital at the Purcell Room, a homage to the composer himself, alongside the tenor Robert Tear, the cellist Bernard Richards, and Leppard as harpsichordist.
She was a highly effective actor, and her abilities came to the fore in such leading roles as Manon Lescaut in Henze’s Boulevard Solitude (by the New Opera Company at Sadler’s Wells, 1962), and as Jenny in Brecht and Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, presented by Sadler’s Wells Opera (1963), both of these UK premieres. In 1982 she sang Ludmila in The Bartered Bride with Welsh National Opera.
Williamson was a native of Australia, and Cantelo’s involvement in his operas took her there and to New Zealand where, in 1972, she directed a staging of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen at the University of Canterbury.
Born in Purbrook, Hampshire, April was the daughter of Herbert Cantelo, an amateur cellist, and his wife, Marie (nee Abraham). Her secondary education came at Chelmsford high school for girls, in Essex. As a good pianist as well as a singer, she would go on to study piano and voice at the Royal College of Music, London, the latter under Julian Kimbell and Frederic Jackson.
An audition at Dartington Hall led to six months of vocal education under Imogen Holst, among others. Accepted as a student by the National School of Opera (now the National Opera Studio), she developed further under the experienced conductor Vilém Tauský and the school’s joint founder, the eminent soprano Joan Cross, herself the creator of roles in several of Britten’s major works.
Cantelo began her professional life as a member of the New English Singers, the Deller Consort and the Glyndebourne Chorus.
When she started in the chorus, in 1948, she met Colin Davis, a young clarinettist in the orchestra seeking to make a name for himself as a conductor; they married the following year. She remained the chief breadwinner for a substantial period while Davis’s career slowly took off. They had two children, Suzanne and Christopher. The marriage was dissolved in 1964 after Davis fell in love with the family’s au pair, Ashraf Naini, who became his second wife later that year.
Cantelo continued her career and later became a sought-after and valued teacher at leading institutions such as the Royal Northern College of Music and the (now Royal) Welsh College of Music and Drama: among her best-known pupils is the soprano Rosemary Joshua.
In retirement she trained an amateur choir in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, and was able to call on former leading singer colleagues to take solo parts in performances.
Her legacy of recordings, made from the 50s to the 70s, is substantial. Notable from the baroque era are Charpentier’s Messe de Minuit pour Noël and Handel’s Ode for St Cecilia’s Day under David Willcocks, Messiah under Walter Susskind, Purcell’s The Indian Queen under Charles Mackerras, and the same composer’s Hail! Bright Cecilia under Michael Tippett.
There are Haydn masses under George Guest, Héro in Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict under Davis, Miss Wordsworth in Britten’s Albert Herring, and Juliet in his The Little Sweep – both conducted by the composer – and various works by Williamson, as well as Hugh Wood. BBC studio recordings of Wagner’s early works Die Feen (in which she sang the role of Ada) and Das Liebesverbot (Isabella) were subsequently issued by Deutsche Grammophon.
Among solo discs, another collaboration with Leppard, conducting a collection of 18th-century Shakespearean settings, shows her at her considerable best.
She is survived by Suzanne, three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
• April Rosemary Cantelo, soprano, born 2 April 1928; died 16 July 2024
