Coup of the night will come from triple NS&I album of the year collaboration featuring Camilla Kerslake, Blake and Howard Goodall’s Enchanted Voices.
Demonstrating her extraordinary voice will be 21-year-old Camilla Kerslake. The determined soprano managed to get herself signed to Gary Barlow’s record label ‘Future’ by turning up on a daily basis to a London studio where Take That were recording and thrusting her demo at Gary. It paid off, Gary was “captivated” by Camilla’s voice and Ms Kerslake now has a chart-topping album and will be touring with The Priests this summer.
She joins the massively successful vocal quartet Blake. The four young men first discovered how good their voices sounded together by spontaneously performing a rendition of ‘Moon River’ at a house party in London. They triumphed with a Classical BRIT win in 2008. The final addition to the triple performance will be Howard Goodall’s Enchanted Voices. Winning ‘Composer of the year’ at last year’s Classical BRIT Awards Howard Goodall is currently ‘composer-in-residence’ for the Classic FM radio station and his album ‘Enchanted Voices’, a modern exploration of ancient chants, has proved to be a best seller.
In the genre of Opera, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa is a familiar figure in the leading opera houses of the world. Her operatic repertoire includes major heroines of the Austro-German school; Mozart’s Countess (Le Nozze di Figaro), Donna Elvira (Don Giovanni), Pamina (Die Zauberflote) and Fiordiligi (Cosi fan tutte), Richard Strauss’ Marschallin (Der Rosenkavalier), Countess (Capriccio) and the title role in Arabella in addition to Italian roles such as Mimi (Puccini’s La Boheme), Violetta (Verdi’s La Traviata) and Elizabeth (Verdi’s Don Carlos) and the French roles of Marguerite (Gounod’s Faust) and Micaela (Bizet’s Carmen). Amongst her many defining moments, in 1990 Dame Kiri Te Kanawa recorded an extraordinary version of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story with José Carreras.
This Award comes at a pinnacle moment in Dame Kiri Te Kanawa’s career as she uses her lifetimes experience to nurture brand new talent. Not only does she have her own foundation helping young New Zealand students, but she also teaches each July at the Solti Te Kanawa Accademia in Italy as well as doing master classes around the world including the Met where she is currently performing and teaching. Shortly Dame Kiri Te Kanawa begins a nationwide search for an opera star of the future. The BBC Radio 2 Kiri Prize will look for real vocal talent that, through the medium of radio, will be judged solely on vocal talent alone. In fact, early in Dame Kiri Te Kanawa career, she herself won a radio competition, bringing her story full circle.
Returning for their third year is the London Chamber Orchestra (LCO). LCO is the longest established professional chamber orchestra in the UK, founded in 1921 by Anthony Bernard, and premiering at the London home of Viscountess Nancy Astor. The LCO’s patron is HRH The Duchess of Cornwall who attended the Classical BRIT Awards in 2007 and 2009. They will be conducted by Christopher Warren-Green.
The Classical BRIT Awards were established in 2000 to recognise the outstanding achievements of classical musicians and the growth of classical music sales in the UK. The awards have proved their vital importance to the UK music industry with the huge impact the event has on record sales of those artists performing, winning and nominated.