LotteBetts-Dean

/
  • Mezzo-Soprano

About Lotte

Praised for her “irrepressible sense of drama and unmissable, urgent musicality” (The Guardian), Australian mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean is passionate about curation and programming, with a broad repertoire that encompasses contemporary, chamber and early music, as well as art song, opera, oratorio and non-classical collaborations. As a specialist in contemporary repertoire, Lotte has premiered many works by contemporary composers, and recorded several composer portrait albums, including Michael Finnissy, Stuart MacRae, Catherine Lamb and Arthur Keegan.

Recent highlights include her debut at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Weinberg’s Die Passagierin singing Vlasta, and at the Grand Théâtre de Genève in Shlomowitz’ Electric Dreams. This summer brought a return to the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra following her debut in 2019 with Sir Andrew Davis, as well as a return to the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, West Cork Chamber Music Festival and Kings Place London. Earlier in the season, she returned to Wigmore Hall for a recital with the Armida Quartet.

The 2024/25 season sees Lotte return to Bayerische Staatsoper, as well as debuts with Ensemble MusikFabrik in Cologne, Phaedra Ensemble for Music in the Round, at Festival November Music in s’Hertogenbosch and New Music Dublin. Lotte will also record and release a further seven albums across Delphian Records, Odradek Records and Platoon.

Lotte is an alumnus of the Young Artist programmes at Britten Pears Arts, City Music Foundation and Oxford Lieder, having won the 2019 Oxford Lieder Platform with frequent collaborator Joseph Havlat. She has returned to the Festival every year since, curating a series of programmes of everything from Renaissance lute song and German lied to 20th-century art song, cabaret and experimental art rock, including her acclaimed solo voice and electronics show Voice Electric, which debuted at the Aldeburgh Festival in 2022.

Earlier this year, Lotte won the Young Artist Award at the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards, who praised her as "a visionary performer, initiating one bold collaboration after another." She is an Ambassador for Donne, a charitable foundation dedicated to promoting gender equality in the music industry, and in 2022 she was named as an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music for her contributions to music.

Lotte is based in London

Download programme biography   

Contact

Ivo Ivanov

Ivo Ivanov

Assistant Artist Manager

Follow Lotte

Season Highlights

Nov 2024
Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich
Mieczysław Weinberg‘s Die Passagierin (Vlasta)
Jan 2025
Upper Chapel, Sheffield
Sounds of Now: Quartet for Heart and Breath at Music in the Round with Phaedra Ensemble

Video

Photos

Selected Repertoire

Adams

Nixon In China (Nancy T'ng)

Britten

A Midsummer Night's Dream (Hermia)

De Falla

El retablo de Maese Pedro (El Trujaman- The Boy Narrator)

Dean

Hamlet (Semi chorus)

Handel

Giulio Cesare (Sesto)   •   Ariodante (Title)   •   Theodora (Title)   •   Hercules (Dejanira)

Mills

The Magic Pudding (Benjamin)

Mozart

Le Nozze di Figaro (Cherubino)   •   Don Giovanni (Donna Elvira)   •   Cosi fan tutte (Dorabella)

Rameau

Hippolyte et Aricie (Phedre)   •   Castor et Pollux (Phebe)   •   La lyre enchantée

Schlomowitz

Electric Dreams (Mezzo Role)

Smetanin

Mayakovsky (Elsa)

Tchaikovsky

Eugene Onegin (Filipyevna, Olga)

News

Press

  • Solitude with Schubert

    With pianist George Fu at Aldeburgh Festival
    Jun 2025

    • On stage, Betts-Dean brought drama, fervour and a contemplative calm to Schubert‘s cantata-length 1818 song Einsamkeit, with its torn protagonist who veers between longing for a busy public life and craving for the sweet retreat of solitude.

    • ...Betts-Dean secured her status as Festival revelation this year. Her appearance in Visit to Friends on the two consecutive nights before was, amongst an already strong cast, a standout performance.... [Hers] is an encapsulating sound that has a consistent through-line, grace, and an incredible reach... She is a musical guarantee. There is much enthusiastic applause for her role in this special event.

  • A Visit To Friends (Varia/Vanessa)

    Aldeburgh Festival with Jessica Cottis
    Jun 2025

    • Lotte Betts-Dean’s Varia/Vanessa dominated, her mezzo so effusively rounded it was as if she kept finding the resonant frequency of the auditorium.

    • Lotte Betts-Dean leads the small cast as Vanessa/Varia - a charismatic, richly-sung centre-point...

    • ...gorgeously sung by Edward Hawkins, Susanna Hurrell, Marcus Farnsworth and particularly Lotte Betts-Dean, who has the plum role of the spurned former lover.

    • Outstanding among a fine cast was Lotte Betts-Dean, whose gleaming tone irradiated the part of Varia/Vanessa.

    • Vocally, Lotte Betts-Dean and Marcus Farnsworth are a match made in heaven, Betts-Dean with a cool crisp and assertive sound that was a particular a joy to listen to.

    • But Betts-Dean in particular, as singer Vanessa and character Varia, brought emotional subtlety and vocal strength to each side of her role. In her case, character and performer never quite coincide; she made that distance touchingly clear.

  • Hidden Voices with London Sinfonietta

    Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
    Apr 2025

    • ...Lotte Betts-Dean’s mezzo-soprano was exciting, rich and reverberant... Betts-Dean explored the toolkit of her voice to great effect, with velvety tones and precision

  • Arias Reimagined for London Handel Festival x nonclassical

    Stone Nest, London
    Mar 2025

    • In Arias Reimagined, the mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean, a singer of rich and fearless versatility, switched freely between arias from Handel’s Theodora and pop from the past 35 years, including Britney Spears and Cocteau Twins. The common thread was emotional intensity and the keyboard exuberance and invention of harpsichordist Xiaowen Shang.

  • Lotte Betts-Dean at the Sydney Festival

    Pier 2/3, Sydney
    Jan 2025

    • ...Betts-Dean displayed generous versatility, stamina and ambitious range.

    • Singing (and speaking) for 70 minutes, virtually non-stop, was an extraordinary feat of stamina and control and it showcased her formidable vocal technique... To finish this fascinating, breathless smorgasbord Betts-Dean treated the sold-out audience to a dash of cabaret with William Bolcom’s Waitin’ before the wonderful Blossom Dearie’s Touch the Hand of Love brought a sense of gentle peace to the end of the set.

  • Boots and All with Ensemble Q

    QPAC Concert Hall, Brisbane
    Aug 2024

    • It was a musical dance around the world with... the UK-based mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean rousing the rabble with her robust voice and mastery of lingo, singing in seven different languages. Her Gaelic crooning of Scottish composer Stuart MacRae’s Chaidh mo Dhonnachadh‘na bheinn (My Duncan has Gone to the Hill) was impressive and a dramatic start to an intriguing concert. The wide-mouthed vowels and glottal stops did not deter her from beaming with infectious enjoyment throughout the haunting piece accompanied by cello and violin.

  • Album Review - Brett Dean: Rooms of Elsinore

    BIS Records
    Aug 2024

    • Gertrude Fragments throws focus on Brett Dean’s clear and lyrical text setting… we hear little unorthodoxies or extended techniques in service of the words and a performance from Lotte Betts-Dean that gets through plenty of gears, illumination and psychological probing.

    • ...Gertrude Fragments for mezzo and guitar are far from mere studies, standing as complete, nay almost perfect, works in themselves. They find the ideal advocates in... mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean and guitarist Andrey Lebedev...

    • Gertrude Fragments is performed by mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean and classical guitarist Andrey Lebedev. “I cast thy knighted color off” begins the group with a wide-ranging, angular setting. Betts-Dean has a versatile instrument, with a strong lower register and blossoming high notes.

  • Album Review - The Past & I: 100 Years of Thomas Hardy

    Delphian Records
    Jul 2024

    • Betts-Dean, who has an acute response to the texts, is equally at home in the pastoral wistfulness of Gerald Finzi and Imogen Holst as in the quirky originality of Kerry Andrew (b 1978).

    • Betts-Dean is utterly compelling throughout, with immaculate diction and a full palette of colours available across her wide range...

    • ...this really packs an emotional punch ... the purity of tone as well as the precision of Lotte Betts-Dean's singing is just extraordinary...

      • BBC Radio 3
      • 19 July 2024

  • Album Review - Earth, thy cold is keen

    Delphian Records
    Aug 2023

    • The Captive, a setting of Emily Brontë’s The Prisoner, written for Betts-Dean, suits perfectly the singer’s pure tone and skilful storytelling powers.

    • Betts-Dean’s voice is the focus, at times ethereal, others bracingly earthy, and often featuring agile, decorative curlicues.

    • starkly beautiful ... MacRae wrote the majority of the music on this album especially for Betts-Dean after hearing her perform his The Lif of this World a few years ago, and it's easy to see why her distinctive, plangent voice and insightful way with text proved such a wellspring of inspiration.

    • Lotte Betts-Dean’s ability to juggle the musical and linguistic differences between all the works shows her incredible knack as a performer.

    • Captivated by the unique, surreal quality of Australian mezzo soprano Lotte Betts-Dean’s voice – a folk-like purity embellished with beguiling ornamentation – Stuart MacRae set about composing eight works for her over a recent intense two-year period. The results are enchanting, characterfully revealed in the album Earth, Thy Cold Is Keen...

      • Ken Walton, The Scotsman
      • 18 July 2023

  • Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra's Wagner's Dream

    Brighton Dome Concert Hall
    Jan 2024

    • The two violas that accompany the first song sounded as if they were bickering fiercely while Lotte Betts-Dean declaimed ‘Black is the colour’ in rich, wistful tones. All the songs are set so delicately that they showed off her voice beautifully, sometimes sweetly pastoral, sometimes edgy and rustic... The concluding ‘Azerbaijan Love Song’ has such a seductive tune and was sung with so much joy that the cheeky spoken coda brought the house down.

  • Armida Quartet in Recital

    Wigmore Hall
    Jan 2024

    • Expanding the piano accompaniments for string quartet brings out the dramatic potential of Schumann’s songs – and Betts-Dean, dressed and coiffed as if in a nod to 16th-century portraiture, amplified this in her typically charismatic performance.

  • Lunchtime Recital at Buxton Festival

    Buxton Theatre
    Jul 2017

    • Dowland lute songs and Britten folk songs showed off Betts-Dean’s warm lower register and impressive control, and Lebedev’s quietly expressive virtuosity. But it was Betts-Dean’s irrepressible sense of drama and extraordinary self-assurance in her father Brett Dean’s Gertrude Fragments (spin-offs from his recent Hamlet for Glyndebourne) that made this recital so compelling. As singing plunged by turn into whispering or guttural groaning, Betts-Dean manoeuvred unflustered between registers and vocal modes with an unbroken sense of line and an unmissable, urgent musicality.

  • Album Review - Benjamin Britten: Canticles

    Delphian Records
    Apr 2025

Discography