April Cantelo, who has died aged 96, was a talented and versatile English soprano with a clear, silvery voice. She grew up in the Glyndebourne choir and created the role of Helena in Benjamin Britten’s opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Aldeburgh Festival in June 1960. She later held a special place in the hearts of the country’s younger singers, coaching several generations in technique, guiding their repertoire and encouraging their ambitions with helpful but honest advice.
The tall and imposing April Cantelo won acclaim for her interpretation of both old and new music. She sang Xantippe in the first professional British production of Telemann’s Der patiëntene Socrates for Kent Opera, conducted by Roger Norrington, in 1974, and Manon Lescaut in the British premiere of Hans Werner Henze’s Boulevard Solitude with the New Opera Company in 1962. She also gave a magnificent account of Jenny in the British premiere of Kurt Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogonny (1963), and appeared in the world premiere of Malcolm Williamson’s Edith Sitwell adaptation, English Eccentrics, in 1964.
She made something of a specialty of Williamson’s operas, appearing as Beatrice Weston in his Graham Greene story Our Man in Havana (1963); Berthe in his lushly romantic The Violins of Saint-Jacques (1966), based on the book by Patrick Leigh-Fermor; and Swallow in a recording of his children’s opera The Happy Prince (1965), based on the story by Oscar Wilde. Although many criticized Williamson’s “pop opera” approach, she was impressed by the way he wrote with specific singers in mind. “The harmonic quality in his melodies brings out the best in people’s voices,” she told The Daily Telegraph in 1975.
Like many singers, April Cantelo found the audience’s coughing distracting, and said the fear of doing so often caused people to cough more. Her advice to those who suffered from it was to quietly slip out of the room, but if that wasn’t possible, she suggested a simple trick: “Breathe in through your nose and out slowly, counting to 10: it takes away that nervous feeling.”
April Rosemary Cantelo was born in Purbrook, Hampshire, on 2 April 1928, the daughter of Herbert Cantelo, an amateur cellist, and his wife Marie (née Abraham). She was educated at Chelmsford Girls School, sang Bach arias with the Chelmsford Festival Orchestra in 1947, and took piano lessons at the Royal College of Music, London.
Her early ambition was to be “a research scientist — a medical type,” she told the Oakland Tribune in 1971. She played piano and sang in the church choir, but when someone suggested she try out for a singing audition, she “thought it was a really funny thing.”
The audition was for Dartington Hall, a small art school in Devon. “I got six months with them and a lot of training, plus the opportunity to go back to academic research if I didn’t like singing,” she said. Needless to say, she never went back – although, she said, “I sometimes look back and wonder… This is a strange life, an extension of ‘let’s pretend’, and it’s a long, hard climb up.”
April Cantelo’s vocal talents soon became apparent and she joined the National Opera Studio to study with Vilem Tausky. Her other teachers were Joan Cross and Imogen Holst, who remembered her as an excellent viola player. Once, during an orchestral rehearsal, there was a strange noise behind her head, “and without stopping she turned to see what it was, while she continued playing,” Imogen Holst wrote.
In 1948 April Cantelo performed with the New English Singers, the Deller Consort and the Glyndebourne Festival Chorus. The Glyndebourne orchestra that summer included the clarinetist and future conductor Colin Davis. They married the following year, although she was the main breadwinner during what he called the “amateur wilderness” of his early years.
“My career took off before his because I was a young singer and there are more opportunities for a young singer than for a young conductor,” she told the Daily Mail. “So he had to do his share of babysitting, which was probably frustrating.”
Davis didn’t always help himself. Friends recalled him accompanying her to a rehearsal, where he spent the entire time fiddling with his shoe. Their struggle paid off, at least for him, when he was offered the position of assistant conductor with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in 1957.
April Cantelo made her solo debut with the Glyndebourne company at the 1950 Edinburgh Festival as Echo in Ariadne auf Naxos, singing with great charm Strauss’s little arietta at the beginning of the piece, and as Barbarina in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro. The following year she appeared, again as Barbarina, on the Sussex stage. In 1953 she reprised her Echo there and also sang Blonde in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail.
By this time she had made her debut at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in a small role in The Magic Flute under John Pritchard. She had also made her debut at the Aldeburgh Festival, playing a charming Rosetta in Arthur Oldham’s production of Thomas Arne’s 18th-century pastiche Love in a Village for the English Opera Group.
Her first appearance at the Proms was in the Proms premiere of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana in 1958, conducted by Basil Cameron. She returned to the Royal Albert Hall nine more times until 1973, singing in works including Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral Symphony, Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été and a concert arrangement of Williamson’s Our Man in Havana. In 1967 she took part in the opening concert of the Purcell Room at the South Bank Centre, appearing for the Apollo Society with Raymond Leppard and Robert Tear in a programme appropriately entitled “Homage to Henry Purcell”.
In the 1970s, April Cantelo’s career took her to Australia, where she appeared frequently in Williamson’s operas. She was also a visiting lecturer at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and in 1972 she directed a production of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen there.
April Cantelo quietly slipped off the stage and in 1979 founded the Highnam Court Project with conductor Roger Smith. Their plan was to transform the 17th-century Gloucestershire manor house, once in the family of composer Hubert Parry, into an arts foundation. Opera weekends were held and in 1981 their restoration work was featured in an ATV documentary.
She settled in Oxfordshire and transformed the amateur villagers of All Saints Singers in Sutton Courtenay, near Abingdon, into a professional-sounding choir, even persuading a number of her professional colleagues to join the Singers as soloists in Haydn Masses, Bach Passions and Telemann oratorios.
Three years ago, her portrait was painted by Ruth Swain, in a pink wool cap and a thick beige coat, a walking stick in each of her gloved hands. The artist suggested calling it Soprano; April Cantelo replied: “You’d better call it Lady With Two Sticks.”
April Cantelo’s marriage to Davis ended in 1964 after he began a relationship with Ashraf Naini, known as Shamsi, their children’s Iranian au pair, whom he later married. He died in 2013. They had a daughter and a son.
April Cantelo, born April 2, 1928, died July 16, 2024
