It’s the height of the August heatwave when I sit down opposite British soprano Louise Alder in a fiercely air-conditioned central London office. We’re here to discuss her headline performance at this year’s Last Night of the Proms but, as a seasonal warmup, I ask whether she’s had a break this summer. Alder looks faintly amused, then reminds me she’s been at Glyndebourne doing three performances of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro every week since the end of June. In fact, she was on stage as the Countess barely 12 hours earlier.
“It’s never-ending,” she says. “I don’t want this to come across negatively – it’s been the most amazing contract – but an extremely long run. Twenty shows, which I think is the longest single run that Glyndebourne has done.” Days after the show closed, the company performed it again at the Proms. “And then a week and a half later, I come back for the Last Night.”
Alder will be the first British singer in more than a decade to top the billing at the Last Night of the Proms. She steps into the UK’s highest-profile classical spotlight in the wake of international stars including Angel Blue, Lise Davidsen, Juan Diego Flórez and Jonas Kaufmann. It was, she giggles, “very surreal” to be invited.
Given that when we speak she has more Glyndebourne performances and another Proms appearance first, is the Last Night taking up much brain-space yet? “A lot. Yeah. The outfits!” she laughs, before another careful shift back to business. “And the repertoire and preparing and feeling that I’ve got everything in place to be as calm as possible.”
Alder came to singing relatively late. After playing the violin and oboe as a child, she started to tread the boards in plays, musicals and operas at university but only began intensive voice training as a postgraduate at the Royal College of Music. Now 38 and back in London after almost a decade at the Frankfurt Opera, she has become one of the most sought-after British singers of her generation. You’ll find her on major operatic stages across the UK and Europe, in recital programmes with regular collaborator Joseph Middleton and on several critically acclaimed recordings. In November she will make her debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, in Strauss’s Arabella.
She has suffered nerves ever since winning the Dame Joan Sutherland audience prize at the 2017 Cardiff Singer of the World competition. “Once you start feeling that people have expectations, that’s when the nerves come, because you feel you’ve got something to lose. I have to say to myself that what we do is not brain surgery. It doesn’t matter if something goes wrong. No one is going to die! But we feel like we let ourselves down, or rather we let the crowd and the people who support us down – and that’s hard.”
She has been doing some visualisation, she tells me. It helps that she already knows what it feels like to sing at the Royal Albert Hall; since her debut there, in another Glyndebourne performance, of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier in 2014, she has performed at numerous Proms and knows the venue’s acoustic well. “It’s always a challenge. I’ve done very intimate things like the Bach St Matthew Passion – and you really want to sing on a knife-edge of piano. But … you have 6,000 people and a huge auditorium to get across to, and yet you also have a microphone right in front of your face – these things are extremely different! And it’s even more extreme when it’s televised.”
So how is Alder feeling about standing there, looking out on a sea of flags and inflatables? “The atmosphere is going to be infectious – I can’t wait!” She’s also excited about the music she will be singing (including a number from Lehár’s operetta The Merry Widow – “if anyone ever offered me some musical theatre or more operetta, I would love that!”) and thrilled to be part of the evening’s all-female lineup alongside trumpeter Alison Balsom, conductor Elim Chan and commissioned composers Camille Pépin and Rachel Portman.
But what about performing Rule, Britannia!, the Thomas Arne number that has featured annually on the programme since 1953? The unabashed imperialism of its lyrics has proved controversial in recent years, most recently when cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the first Black winner of the BBC Young Musician competition, pointed out that the song makes many people feel “uncomfortable”. When I ask Alder about its inclusion, she says without hesitation: “It’s genuinely an honour for me to sing at the Last Night and be part of that and the history.” Case closed, I assume. But a moment later, she adds with sudden feeling: “We want to entice people in to watch the concert – with the traditions – and to make people from every background feel comfortable to watch.”
On other matters, Alder is more explicit. She is open about the challenges of being a travelling musician as well as a parent of a toddler (she and her horn-player husband “do juggling of childcare as our bread and butter”) and has since announced that she’s expecting their second child. She returned to work just nine weeks after giving birth to their first. “I watched my bank balance disappear – I had to go back,” she shrugs. “People asked, ‘How much maternity leave are you taking?’ And I thought, ‘I don’t have any – that isn’t a thing.’” She’s adamant that more support is needed in general for freelancers. “We saw this in the pandemic – it was abysmal.”
Brexit, meanwhile, happened while Alder was still living in Germany – “a huge shock to all of us in the artistic community” – and “does make our lives [as musicians] more difficult. That’s just a fact.” She still works regularly in Europe, and admits that, when she coaches young singers, “I do advise them to go abroad. Given the situation funding-wise in this country, we don’t have a choice. There isn’t enough work or money in the arts here.”
By this time, the rhetorical safety catch is off and Alder is fluently frustrated. The crisis around the funding of professional opera choruses in the UK is “heartbreaking”: compared to when she was at college “only just over a decade ago, the cultural landscape is completely decimated”. Her daughter’s nursery does lots of music, but “as soon as they go to school, there’s almost nothing”. And yet, Alder insists, “music is imperative for us at a molecular level. It’s the thing that everyone turned to in the pandemic. It’s what we turn to for comfort. It broadens the mind. We’re losing the heart of our nation by starving the arts and culture.”
