In a remarkable career spanning over thirty years, Sarah Connolly has become one of the UK’s leading and most distinguished mezzo-sopranos. Born in County Durham, she studied piano and singing at the Royal College of Music, of which she is now a Fellow. After training at RCM, Sarah joined the renowned BBC Singers, but her full-time career and interest in opera and classical music really took off after she left the BBC Singers. She began her opera career in the role of Annina Der Rosenkavalier in 1994, but her breakthrough role was as Xerxes in the 1998 ENO’s production of Handel's Serse directed by Nicholas Hytner.
In 2005 Sarah made her debut at Glyndebourne, then her debut at the Metropolitan Opera, New York in Mozart’s La clemenza de Tito. In the same opera at ENO in 2006 Sarah won her first Olivier Award. In 2009 she went on to make her debuts at both Teatro all Scala and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. In 2011 she was awarded the 2011 Distinguished Musician Award from the Incorporated Society of Musicians.
Sarah’s career continued to flourish. She has sung at the Aldeburgh, Edinburgh, Lucerne, Salzburg and Tanglewood Festivals and the BBC Proms where, in 2009, she was the soloist at the celebrated Last Night, when she famously wore a replica Royal navy uniform of Lord Nelson. Opera engagements have taken her around the world’s greatest opera houses from The Metropolitan Opera, Royal Opera House, the Paris Opera, La Scala Milan, the Vienna and Bavarian Staatsopern, Liceu Barcelona, La Monnaie Brussels, the Bayreuth, Glyndebourne and Aix-en-Provence Festivals. Sarah has also collaborated with leading conductors and orchestras including Sir Simon Rattle, Marin Alsop, the London Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus, London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Antonio Pappano, and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, both in the concert hall and the recording studio.
Sarah was awarded a CBE in the 2010 New Year Honours, then in 2017 was made a DBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to music. In 2023 Dame Sarah Connolly was awarded The King’s Medal for Music, an award given annually to an outstanding individual or group of musicians who have had a major influence on the musical life of the nation.
Her wide-ranging career has included works from Handel and Purcell, to Wagner, but has also been a champion of 20th-century and modern composers such as Tippett, Sir John Taverner and Mark-Anthony Turnage. Her experience with the operas of Benjamin Britten has been limited this far with The Rape of Lucretia at ENO and Bavarian Staatsoper, so we are especially thrilled that Dame Sarah Connolly is joining WNO to sing her debut in the role of Auntie in this Spring Season’s new production of Britten’s masterpiece Peter Grimes, and also collaborating with WNO Music Director Tomáš Hanus and the wonderful WNO Orchestra in a concert of Mahler, Schubert and Sibelius at Cardiff’s Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in April.
