Article published in Manchester Evening News 4 November 2016

I WROTE last week about Billy Budd, one of Opera North’s upcoming programmes at The Lowry, alongside Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and a Puccini double bill of Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica.

Il Tabarro, a tragedy of infidelity and revenge, is an update of the award-winning production of 2004. Suor Angelica is new: it’s set in a nunnery, to which the heroine has fled to escape the shame of having an illegitimate child.

In its cast is Bury-born soprano Soraya Mafi, one of today’s rising opera stars. I chatted with her about making it in a highly competitive world.

“I always loved singing and dancing,” she said. “My mum loved singing, and I had a natural affinity for it, but I would probably have been a dancer if I hadn’t had problems with my back when I was a teenager.”

Then she won the National Junior English Song Award in 2004, aged 15.

“It gave me a bursary for singing lessons, and mum got in touch with the Royal Northern College of Music. Sandra Dugdale took me on – and I still see her regularly.

“I had a lot of problems: I completely lost my voice at one point, and she was a rock for me. I worked my way through college, doing corporate events, football matches, hotel gigs – then when I didn’t get any scholarships to go further I worked in Selfridge’s for two years.”

But she won her way to a postgraduate place at the Royal College of Music in London, where she was taught by Opera North favourite Janis Kelly – and she still studies with her and coach David Harper.

Recently Soraya has picked up several big awards, coming second in the Kathleen Ferrier competition in 2015 and first in the Susan Chilcott Award this year.  She also got some good roles in opera productions, and she’s a Harewood Young Artist with English National Opera.

But she still lives in Chorlton and keeps close to her family, now in Rossendale.

Her role in the Puccini opera is Suor Genoveva – a character she describes as ‘vivacious and youthful’ and very much the opposite of the guilt-ridden title role. “She’s down to earth and she gets on with it,” she says. I can see those traits in Soraya Mafi, too.

Soraya Mafi sings in Suor Angelica, The Lowry, Nov 11, and also in Mozart’s Requiem, Bridgewater Hall, Nov 13