What would a world without music be like?’ It’s a question that has been preoccupying Mary Bevan, one of the brightest lights to have emerged on the British opera scene in recent years. Bevan asks the question in despair at the erosion of music provision in the early lives of children in Britain: ‘If I had my way, every school day would start with at least five minutes of listening to a great piece of classical music,’ she says. For Bevan, a life without music would have been impossible: it has been integral to her identity from the moment she drew breath. Her father, a choirmaster, was one of 14 children who were all musically gifted and sang in the school choir. Mary herself is one of an extended family of siblings, half-siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins – around 60 in total, she estimates – who were immersed in music from an early age. At 15, she sang Cherubino in a production of The Marriage of Figaro that included her mother as The Countess and her sister Sophie (who of course has a stellar career of her own – more of that later) as Susanna.

Home in rural Berkshire wasn’t a musical hot-house, though. ‘We were pretty wild as kids, and we had a lot of freedom. We didn’t have a telly and so we invented crazy games. I remember it as a bundle of fun, really.’ Fun is important to Mary Bevan, something that is obvious when you see her on stage. British audiences delighted in her appearances as Morgana, the sexy, irrepressible sidekick to Lisette Oropesa’s Alcina in Richard Jones’ production of Handel’s opera at the Royal Opera House. ‘I’m lucky that I’m often cast in roles that align with my personality, and Morgana was certainly one.’ That personality comes with a degree of physical abandon (‘I love dancing’) and a determination to wear life lightly. ‘We live in a world where everyone gets bogged down in the smallest details of their lives – all condensed into a niggling tweet. I think that means we miss the bigger picture. The ability to see the wider world and to take ourselves with a pinch of humour. That’s where music, art and culture come in, and that’s why opera matters. It allows us to step out of ourselves.’

Bevan’s easy, breezy personality isn’t of course, the complete picture. She has faced a host of challenges. An early marriage (to baritone Charles Rice, whom she met when they were students at the Royal Academy) didn’t work out, but it did produce a much loved son, Albert. Then, of course, there was the fact that Mary’s career has had to emerge on its own terms out of the shadow of her sister Sophie, just a year-and-a-half older and a major player on the international opera stage. The two are incredibly close and supportive, but for Mary, finding her own style hasn’t been straightforward. ‘Sophie was my best friend, a role model from a very young age, and to begin with, I tended to emulate her as a singer. She has a lot of dark-hued colours in her voice, and I tried to sing like her, which meant I was darkening my voice too much.’

Mary Bevan in Cavalli ’s La Calisto at Bayerische Staatsoper (photo: Wilfried Hosl)

It wasn’t her natural style and resulted in a certain amount of vocal tension. Mary’s soprano voice is a lighter, brighter creature altogether. Finding her true colours is an ongoing process that began with leaving the comfortable bosom of her family to win a place at Cambridge University to read Anglo Saxon, Norse and Celtic. ‘It was a type of rebellion really. I needed to show that music wasn’t the only option for me in life, and that I had a brain somewhere up there.’ At Cambridge, surprisingly, she wasn’t accepted into Trinity College Choir – her voice was deemed too mature, too ‘womanly’. But she did have lessons with mezzo and highly respected teacher Alison Wells.

‘Alison taught me how to use my full voice and how to free it from the constraints that you have to apply as a choral singer. I began to explore the full range and power of my voice, but probably went too far with that.’ To develop her singing skills, Bevan moved on to the Royal Academy of Music. ‘At the Academy, Lilian Watson taught me how to bring focus to my voice, to lose its breathiness and gain a brilliance that would make an instrument ideally suited to the Baroque and Classical repertoire, which I love. To be honest, I think I moved too far in that direction, too. So really, finding my voice has been a process of whittling away at things – trying one approach, taking it to an extreme and then bringing it back to a middle ground.’

The Royal Academy provided a setting where Bevan could thrive in her own right. A 2010 review of a student production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte described her portrayal of the fast-talking, cynical maid Despina as ‘played to perfection’. On leaving the Academy, however, she once again became ‘the other Bevan sister’, back in her sister’s shadow. Her first professional engagement was as Barbarina in John Cox’s production of The Marriage of Figaro for Garsington Opera, which also featured Sophie as Susanna. ‘I was always “second lady” – not Sophie’s fault. It’s just the way things unfolded for me as a younger sister in the same profession. People in auditions looking down the list of singers must have been thinking: Oh god, not another bloody Bevan!’

Over the next decade, Mary found her stride as a soprano with her own unique qualities. Forging a career first of all as the spouse of another opera singer and then as a single mother with a young son wasn’t easy: ‘Being away from home for weeks on end was hard. We spent most of what we earnt on childcare!’ But the roles kept coming: notable among them are Rose Maurrant in Weill’s Street Scene for Opera de Monte Carlo; Eurydice in Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld for English National Opera; and her debut with the Danish Opera debut as Bellezza in Il Trionfo del tempo e del desinganno. Contemporary opera is another area in which she is distinguishing herself: She appeared in the title role at the world premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Coraline and she created the role of Lila in David Bruce The Firework-Maker’s Daughter, both commissioned by the Royal Opera House.

As she entered her early 30s, the course seemed set for a brilliant career, showered with accolades including the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Young Artist award and the UK Music Critics’ Circle’s award for Exceptional Young Talent. In 2019, she received an MBE for her services to music. Then came the debacle of 2020, when everything ground to an abrupt halt as the pandemic took hold. ‘As everything started to be cancelled, I thought, Oh well, it’s a chance to be at home with Albie and my partner, and kick my shoes off and lie on the sofa enjoying a glass of wine for a change.’ However, as the extent of the damage that Covid was inflicting on her profession became clear, she decided it was time for action.

Mary Bevan (photo: Tamara Thalhammer)

On a practical level, she founded a Covid concert series at her local church in north-east London, repurposing the churchyard of St Mary’s Hornsey to become a temporary open-air opera venue. The series was called Music at the Tower, after the bell tower that formed a backdrop. It may have been a local venture, but it also displayed the breathtaking range and influence of the Bevan address book: among the highlights were a Dido and Aeneas conducted by Trevor Pinnock, and a lively opera gala featuring the likes of Brindley Sherratt, Nicky Spence and Natalya Romaniw. Running through it all were a bevy (if that’s the collective noun) of Bevans, from Sophie and brother baritone Benjamin to soprano sister Daisy. ‘It was a chance to perform, but most importantly it connected musicians with real audiences,’ Mary Bevan recalls. ‘That’s what we most missed through lockdown’.

The pandemic was also a chance to find her campaigning voice, writing eloquently in the Guardian about the plight of freelance musicians such as herself who had been excluded from furlough payments. ‘I’m a self-employed musician with a mortgage to pay. Why have I and so many of my colleagues been abandoned by the government?’ she asked.

For Bevan, the Covid hiatus was a chance to reassess her voice, part of that ‘whittling away’ process that began at Cambridge. ‘I was doing a lot of Handel roles that lie very high in the voice, and I wasn’t feeling comfortable with them. One night I was having dinner with a couple of close friends, John Lattimore and Sam Queen, who are both singing teachers.’ (Queen and Lattimore together run the London Singers Studio). ‘After a few drinks, I admitted that I couldn’t sing above a top C. There just wasn’t anything there. So they gave me three exercises and I did them there and then, on the spot. And suddenly I was singing top Es straightaway! (It was 11 at night, so God knows what the neighbours thought!) Anyway, they asked if I wanted to learn with them at the Studio. I thought sod it, this could be fun, though it might not work because it can be embarrassing singing to your friends and have them tell you what to do. But it’s never once been a problem. They teach me as a pair, and they now also teach Sophie. It’s quite an interesting process – Sam and John are a couple in real life, and they are seamless in the way they pick up from each other during lessons, taking turns to sit at the piano and illustrate a point.’

Mary’s work at the London Singers Studio paid dividends while singing Morgana at the ROH, where there was a new ease and greater colour in the high singing. She has recently been in Munich at the Bavarian State Opera, in the title role of Cavalli’s Calisto. It’s a chance to shine as the leading lady, rather than the ‘second role’ which she has found herself inhabiting through much of her career. ‘I love the Zerlinas, the Marzellinas, the Dorabellas – and I do think these “second ladies” have more fun than the leading lights. Give me Papagena over Pamina any day! David Alden really makes you work as Calisto in his Munich production. It lies very naturally in the voice – quite low compared to Handel and quite free in its vocal writing. So that gives you room to move. This was a very physical production where I was throwing myself around the stage – which I love!’

As Morgana with Lisette Oropesa as Alcina in the Royal Opera House’s production of Alcina (photo: Marc Brenne)

Currently, Bevan is making her debut as Euridice in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice at La Fenice, in a new production by the iconic Italian opera director Pier Luigi Pizzi. She is also recording a new disc of songs by Noël Coward, with her regular concert partner pianist Joseph Middleton, a terrific vehicle for a soprano with an innate sense of sophistication and wit. Among her growing recording legacy, always programmed with intelligence and a sense of purpose, are three albums on the Signum label – a collection of French songs titled Voyages; one of German Lied, The Divine Muse, exploring divinity and mythology, and most recently, Visions Illuminées with pianist Joseph Middleton and the 12 Ensemble. Her career is on a roll again, building back from the damage done by the Covid wrecking ball. Is she looking forward to the crazy pre-pandemic days where concerts in New York would be juxtaposed with a run of opera in Australia? ‘Well, I’m 38 now, and I have a partner and a 12-year-old son, so that means relationships and responsibilities that have to come first.’

Her partner is in fintech – not a musician at all. And son Albie, though an enthusiastic and perceptive critic of opera, has his options wide open in life. A career in music is not a given. ‘It’s great to have non-music people around because it gives me a sense of another world where music isn’t taken for granted. I went to a dinner party the other day with friends of my partner, none of whom knew anything about opera. As is often the way, I was asked to sing something. I’d overheard one woman over dinner saying that she hated opera – hated the sound that opera singers made. Anyway, I sang Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro”, and they were all amazed. The woman who hated opera came up to me and told me I had changed her mind and that she wanted to explore it more. I love schools performances and singing to people who have no preconceptions or are actually prejudiced against opera, which so many people seem to be. In almost every instance, when they actually experience opera and feel its power, its drama, they become completely hooked by it. It’s very satisfying, and that’s what really thrills me about what I do.’ 

This interview originally appeared in the May 2023 issue of Opera Now. Never miss an issue – subscribe today