AliceCoote

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  • Mezzo-Soprano

About Alice

Established as a major star across both operatic and concert stages, mezzo-soprano Alice Coote is regarded as one of the great artists of our time. Coote has performed major roles on stages such as the Metropolitan Opera, Glyndebourne, Royal Opera House, Bayerische Staatsoper, Opéra de Paris, Wiener Staatsoper, LA Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago and Salzburg Festival. Equally acclaimed on the concert stage, she has performed with orchestras including the London Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, The Hallé and The Concertgebouw.

The 24/25 season will see Coote perform Mahler's Symphony No. 2 with the London Symphony Orchestra, before returning to the operatic stage for two productions of Semele (Juno) for the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and the Royal Ballet and Opera.

Engagements in the 23/24 season included Storge Jephtha  at the Royal Opera House; Mahler Symphony No. 3 with Robin Ticciati and the London Philharmonic Orchestra; Beethoven Symphony No. 9 and Mass in C Minor with Dinis Sousa and the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra; and Mahler Symphony No. 3 with Michael Tilson Thomas and the London Symphony Orchestra.

Driven by her passion for exploring and challenging gender stereotypes in characterisation, Coote is renowned for her interpretations of some of opera's most important male and female roles. She brings that same philosophy to her work on the recital platform, an essential extension of Coote's musical life. Committed to audience development and redefining genre barriers, last season Coote premiered her latest project, 'The Rebellious Recital': a song recital including works by Mahler, David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Bach and John Lennon at the Wigmore Hall.

In 2018, she was awarded an OBE for services to music.

Alice is based in the United Kingdom

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Contact

Nicholas Moloney

Nicholas Moloney

Senior Artist Manager
Megan Steller

Megan Steller

Associate Artist Manager

Representation

Worldwide general management with Askonas Holt

Follow Alice

Season Highlights

Feb 2025
Théâtre des Champs-Elysées
Semele (Juno)
Apr 2025
King's Place, London
Das Lied von der Erde
Jun 2025
Royal Ballet and Opera
Semele (Juno)

Video

Photos

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Selected Repertoire

Bartók

Bluebeard’s Castle (Judith)

Berg

Lulu (Geschwitz)

Britten

Gloriana (Lady Penelope)   •   Peter Grimes (Auntie)

Debussy

Pelléas et Melisande (Genevieve)

Donizetti

La fille du régiment (The Marquise of Berkenfield)

Dvořák

Rusalka (Jezibaba)

Handel

Partenope (Arsace)   •   Hercules (Dejanira)   •   Giulio Cesare (Cornelia)   •   Agrippina (Title role)   •   Radamisto (Zenobia)   •   Theodora (Irene)   •   Semele (Juno)   •   Alcina (Ruggiero)

Janáček

Káťa Kabanová (Kabanicha)

Monteverdi

L’incoronazione di Poppea (Ottavia, Nirone)   •   Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (Penelope)

Mozart

Le nozze di Figaro (Marcellina)

Poulenc

Dialogues des Carmélites (Madame de Croissy, Mère Marie)

Puccini

Suor Angelica (La Zia Principessa)

Purcell

Dido and Aeneas (Sorceress)

Strauss

Capriccio (Clarion)   •   Elektra (Klytemnestra)   •   Salome (Herodias)

Stravinsky

The Rake’s Progress (Baba the Turk)

Wagner

Der Ring des Nibelungen (Fricka)   •   Götterdämmerung (Waltraute)

News

Press

  • Handel - Semele (Juno)

    Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Paris
    Feb 2025

    • Alice Coote froths from all available apertures as the spurned Juno, and lets rip with a few notes that must have been heard halfway down the Seine.

    • Juno, whose manipulative artifices Alice Coote assumes with authority and great expressive dexterity (from rage to despair), [but] not without instilling in the portrait of this deceived woman a few moments of doubt and suffering.

    • Alice Coote impresses as Juno whose jealousy, at first burlesque, becomes resolutely violent, with alto low notes that are as biting as they are opulent.

    • Juno, whom the production presents as a formidable, inflexible and manipulative blonde shrew, finds in Alice Coote an ideal interpreter, whose vocal assurance matches her stage presence.

    • Alice Coote is a stepmotherly and sly Juno, vengeful and manipulative, unleashing with her copious breath phrases of flawless musicality with pearly and incisive high notes and generous and brassy low notes as desired.

    • Alice Coote plays Juno, an angry virago stifled by jealousy, extremely effectively, and her masterful 'Awake Saturnia, from thy lethargy', with vocal power and triumphant high notes, results in the first real ovation from the audience. Her subsequent attempts to wake Somnus confirm her qualities as a comic actress.

  • Mahler | Symphony No. 2 - London Symphony Orchestra

    Barbican, London
    Oct 2024

    • The watershed moment came in the first sung movement, Urlicht, the words of this poem sung by Alice Coote like they were being wrenched out of her. The mezzo-soprano really did inhabit both music and text as if her life depended on it — and took the whole performance into another gear.

    • It was with Alice Coote’s incisive, forward singing of the fourth movement, on the edge of vulnerability, that the performance found its emotional depth...

    • ...the woodwinds shone, particularly Juliana Koch (oboe) in response to Alice Coote’s hushed delivery of Urlicht, the mezzo’s dynamic control superb.

    • Alice Coote was beyond celestial in the Urlicht; her volume control is the best of any current mezzo.

    • Guest mezzo-soprano Alice Coote OBE stood for the fourth, giving a considered reading of the text as she sang of life’s end. “Even more would I rather be in heaven,” sounds even more pained sung in German. Acclaimed as a star across both operatic and concert stages, Coote is regarded as one of the great singers of our time.

    • Alice Coote delivered her Urlicht immaculately, with the clearest of diction, impressive volume control and perfect intonation, a highlight of the symphony.

  • Britten - Spring Symphony | LSO Live Recording

    Barbican Hall, London
    Apr 2024

    • He’s also blessed with the finest trio of soloists imaginable... Alice Coote’s sumptuous lower register delivers a softly cushioned “Welcome maids of honour” and she’s magnificent in Auden’s “Out on the Lawn I lie in Bed”.

    • Rattle’s performance here benefits from an excellent stable of soloists in soprano Elizabeth Watts, mezzo-soprano Alice Coote, and tenor Allan Clayton. Coote, in particular, shines during Part 2’s “Welcome, Maids of Honor,” her rich tone and fine diction lending Britten’s leaping melodic writing a beguiling plushness.

  • Michael Berkeley - Collaborations | Orchid Classics

    St.George’s Brandon Hill, Bristol
    Jun 2024

    • Add in a song cycle, Speaking Silence, exploring rest and oblivion, to which Coote brings exceptional, soft, high singing, and some interesting choral pieces... and this is an attractive and unusual album.

  • Mahler - Symphony No. 3 | London Philharmonic Orchestra

    Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre
    Nov 2023

    • Alice Coote looked round the audience imperiously before transporting us to a higher level with a truly magnificent rendition of Nietzsche’s ‘O Mensch! Gib Acht!’, a warning to us all in these turbulent times. Whether soft or loud, this was an exemplary performance and a privilege to have heard. Her sound was always beautiful, German diction clear and perfect, emotion compelling.

    • ... It was wonderful partly because you could see each new thought in the poem prefigured in Alice Coote's expressive face, before she sung it with spine-chilling quiet fervour.

  • Handel - Jephtha (Storgè)

    The Royal Opera House
    Nov 2023 - Nov 2023

  • Berlioz - Les Troyens (Cassandra) | Monteverdi Choir & Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique

    Royal Albert Hall
    Sep 2023

    • To be a pitch of desparate doom-laden foreboding for an hour and half is a superhuman challenge for a singer, but Alice Coote rose to it magnificently ... putting everyone else in the shade.

    • Part one is dominated by Cassandra, the truth-teller who prompts the Trojan women to kill themselves. Alice Coote, commanding the stage with fervour, both vocal and physical, mesmerised and enthralled. If she has sounded more convincing in a role, I can’t recall which.

    • Cassandra, doomed to see the future but unable to change it, drives the first two acts, and Alice Coote was remarkable in the role, thrilling with urgency and anguish.

    • Alice Coote, with the more dramatic sound, took Cassandra right to the edge, supercharging her fateful predictions with electricity.

    • Part 1 of Les Troyens has a vibrant theatrical pulse thanks to the dominant presence of Cassandre, the seer, whose prophesies steer the drama through to the Trojan Horse and beyond. The role needs a singer of presence and power, and in Alice Coote we got one. The prodigious mezzo-soprano has seldom sounded more glorious than she did here...

    • Dominating the first two acts is neither the heroine Dido nor the hero Aeneas but the clairvoyant goddess Cassandra, unfairly marginalised as a doom-mongering madwoman in the Aeneid, but given a key role by Berlioz. Alice Coote, as regal of tone and bearing as if she had been playing Dido herself, held the stage compellingly for a full hour.

    • Coote instantly asserted her authority with velvety nuanced tones, fully mining the sense of foreboding and premonition in the text.

    • But from the moment she came on, delivering her first lines from the midst of the orchestra, it was clear that these first two acts were Alice Coote's. Her Cassandre was mesmerising; sung with great focus and clarity, every word counted and Coote's declamation was superb.

  • Elgar - The Dream of Gerontius (Angel) | The Hallé

    Bridgewater Hall
    Jun 2023

    • Aiding his path to God was Alice Coote's angel, whose glorious voice offered balm and wisdom to us all.

    • Among the soloists, most impressive was Alice Coote’s Angel, a role she has performed on many occasions with this orchestra, not least at the Proms and on disc. She captured a sense of both benevolent warmth and reverential devotion in Part 2, singing with utmost control and beauty of sound as well as careful attention to the drama of the text. Her first Alleluia was magically gentle, while her tremblingly pianissimo (and yet stark) confirmation that Gerontius would soon come before God was strikingly haunting.

  • Various - The Rebellious Recital

    Wigmore Hall
    May 2023

    • Joni Mitchell’s Borderline – ‘Every notion we subscribe to / Is just a borderline’ – could have been the credo of the whole evening, and Coote was both heart-rending and acute with Mitchell’s poetry. Costello and Bacharach’s My Thief, a song as complex and emotional as any lied, was compelling...Few do desolate as well as Coote and, back in the 19th century, Hahn’s L’heure exquise and Tchaikovsky’s My Genius, My Angel, My Friend were both beautifully soaked in it. The night finished with a kind of consolatory quartet: Bach’s Bist du bei mir, Brel’s My Death, Lennon’s Imagine and Strauss’s Morgen. There surely isn’t another singer who could have pulled it off.

    • Given Coote is an artist very much at the peak of her considerable powers, she has surely earned the right to sing what she likes. And this recital showed that taking risks can pay off – handsomely.

    • Coote is one of the great communicators, and we were not disappointed – indeed, the whole evening was an exercise in demonstrating how...a singer can keep the audience engaged through gesture, through eye contact, and expression.

  • Elgar - The Dream of Gerontius (Angel) | The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra

    Symphony Hall, Birmingham
    Mar 2023

    • Mezzo-soprano Alice Coote remains the Angel of choice, affecting, comforting.

    • ...Alice Coote's contribution as the Angel. Less imperious than many predecessors (or contemporaries), the extent of her involvement only deepened as Part Two unfolded - the restraint, even reticence, of My work is done taking on heightened eloquence during There was a Mortal, before the Softly and gently of her farewell brought with it a transfiguring radiance as carried through to the close. This was a thoughtful and, increasingly, affecting approach to some of this work's musical highpoints.

  • Poulenc - Dialogues des Carmélites (Madame de Croissy)

    The Metropolitan Opera
    Jan 2023 - Jan 2023

    • Mezzo-soprano Alice Coote, as Mother Superior Madame de Croissy, thrummed with a dark intensity from the moment she came on stage. Her face and body contorted, wracked with discomfort that rose to agony, this was an utterly vanity-free acting showcase for Coote, matched by an intense and riveting vocal performance that was unafraid to dig into the nastier side of de Croissy. I found her intensely moving in her anger and pain.

    • There are larger, more prominent roles than that of the old nun, Madame de Croissy, the dying Mother Superior of the order, but none has her impact in a brilliantly written death scene that is simply harrowing. Mezzo Alice Coote pulled out all the stops in a dramatic performance that will long stay with me--certainly the best she has ever been in my experience at the Met. It is the opera's sole show-stopping set piece (except for the ending) and, following a list of grand women who have sung the role, Coote certainly did (more than) justice to it.

    • “Relevez-vous” featured the most glorious singing from Coote the entire evening with tenderness in every note. Even the fortes throughout this passage lacked the harder edge that was more present in the sections bookending this passage. When Javelinot entered to warn the Prioress of her impending doom, Coote’s voice lost all of its brightness, the mezzo’s sound harsh, her body flailing all over the bed as she fought to survive. It was a gripping experience and one of the most intense I have witnessed on the Met stage.

    • The Old Prioress, who precedes Lidoine as the order’s Mother Superior, comes to a grisly end early in the opera, with a bang-up death scene that some singers approach with Meryl Streep-like meticulousness. Alice Coote gave an intense performance, more in-the-moment than grandly stylized, her nervy mezzo taking on the growl of a woman whose ox-like strength only prolonged her agony.

    • Coote is age-appropriate for Madame de Croissy according to the libretto; Constance irreverently declares that at 59, is it not time for her to die? Coote, however, is far younger than most singers who are cast in the role, and her relative youthfulness brought a fascinating dynamic to it. This was a vital woman in the prime of life, rather than a woman whose life force is all but spent. That difference made Madame de Croissy’s death scene all the more harrowing.

    • Alice Coote made a ferocious first impression as Madame de Croissy, the old prioress whose agonizing death presages the horrors visited upon the convent. Haughty and dismissive in her initial audience with Blanche, Coote’s Mother Superior touchingly softened at the recognition of the young girl’s misguided but sincere convictions. Although still vocally refulgent, she brought a chilling vulnerability to her character’s painful demise, underscoring the terror that accompanies a loss of faith in your darkest hour.

  • Ravel - Shéhérazade | Sinfonia of London

    Barbican Centre
    Dec 2022

    • Alice Coote’s fervent performance, the way she made the heart-stricken disappointment of the final song melt into sensuous languor was a lesson in how a great performance can turn copper into gold.

    • Ravel’s luscious song cycle Shéhérazade was sung superbly by Alice Coote. Some performers present these three sensuous songs in veiled, breathy timbres. Coote’s approach is far more incisive and intense in its response to the words, with reserves of power unleashed sparingly but with thrilling effect. She is always engaged emotionally. When she is also focused technically she is peerless.

  • Purcell - Dido and Aeneas (Dido)

    Royal Albert Hall
    Jul 2022

    • …fully in the spirit of a superbly evocative night, the mezzo-soprano’s intense theatricality won through, and that final lament struck us in all the right places.

  • Mahler - Kindertotenlieder

    Royal Albert Hall, London
    Jul 2024

    • ...Alice Coote’s fine-grain singing of Mahler...

    • Alice Coote seems made for Mahler, and in this performance of Kindertotenlieder she was at the top of her game. What she did so convincingly was to bring alive both the grief and the drama inherent in these five songs, all in the minor mode save for the final stanza of In diesem Wetter where the shift to the major key introduces a feeling of transcendence. Coote has strong operatic credentials and the richness of her mezzo voice was deployed to full effect in maintaining the narrative line, every movement of her head and upper body signifying emphasis. This was already manifest in the attention she paid to key words in the first song, “die Sonne” and “hell” benefiting from her superb diction, the voice opening out glowingly for “Heil sei dem Freudenlicht”.

Discography