Alice Coote: 'Nothing touches people more than the human voice, unadorned'

Mezzo soprano Alice Coote is the toast of London. And Paris. And Chicago. Nick Kimberley met her

If you are going to be a world-class singer, it pays to let the world know early. That, at least, seems to have been Alice Coote's way. "According to my mother," she says, "I didn't stop screaming for three days when I was born. She had to hand me over to someone else. Perhaps my singing voice began then."

The suggestion is not entirely frivolous. Coote, at 34 one of this country's rising stars, believes in the singing voice, not only as a technical device, but as a powerful, indeed the most powerful communicative vehicle. "Nothing touches people more than the human voice, unadorned. When I watch a great singer, I feel that they are crying, and that great singing is a refined crying for humanity. Maybe that's where it links to me coming out of the womb and screaming for days."

Coote brings rather more art to her vocal utterances these days; and the world has taken note. She has sung with English National Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago, at the Wigmore Hall and the Last Night of the Proms, at the Edinburgh and Salzburg Festivals. Next month she makes her Proms solo recital debut, followed in September by her Royal Opera debut in Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos. Chicago, Amsterdam and San Francisco are on the itinerary, her first solo recording (for EMI) is imminent, and her diary is full until 2005.

On the crest of a wave, she is enjoying every minute of it, although as a mezzo-soprano, she teasingly confesses, "I'm terminally jealous of sopranos. My life's ambition was to sing Salome, Madam Butterfly, Tosca, but I'm coming to terms with my fate. I realised I had a lower voice right from the beginning, when I sang along with Kathleen Ferrier's recording of Blow the Wind Southerly; and my winds were definitely blowing southerly. Over the past few years, my voice has risen and risen, but I've held on to the depths, which I'm happy about. And as a mezzo, I get the chance to play an extraordinary range of characters, including men. I've sung Cherubino in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, and a lot of Handel: the title role in Ariodante, for example, is so different from the character of Ruggiero in Alcina. The humanity of each character is there in the music, that is what is fantastic about Handel. His music could keep you going for a whole career."

While Handel remains on the agenda (she takes the title role in Orlando at Covent Garden next year), Coote has no intention of restricting her repertoire, which ranges from Monteverdi at the beginning of the 17th century, right up to Britten in the 20th century. For her, the breadth of repertoire is not unexpected: "It seems a natural progression. I have to stop myself moving from high Strauss to low Handel too quickly, but the roles that I felt were right for me at the beginning turn out to be the roles that I'm doing now.

"If you are singing correctly, you don't require any change in technique to go from Monteverdi to Strauss. The big leap comes in terms of character and linking emotions to the vocal sound that you are making. Singing Monteverdi is more like being a Shakespearean actor, but the line of the voice remains the same."

For Coote, communication is paramount, and she admits, "I hate it when the auditorium is completely black in the opera house. If you can see the audience, you can see who's bored, who's falling asleep; but you also sense who is with you. Audiences are powerful things, and the challenge is the same whether you are doing opera or a song recital. You can't simply be a singer standing there: you have to talk, human being to human being."

Alice Coote sings in Mozart's Requiem, Barbican, London EC2 (020 7638 8891), Friday and Saturday; and at the BBC Proms (020 7581 9311), 19 August and 1 September