Kathleen Ferrier award winners announced

Mezzo-soprano Esme Bronwen-Smith has been announced as winner of this year’s Kathleen Ferrier award following the competition’s final at London’s Wigmore Hall. This is the festival’s first in person competitions since the start of the pandemic, with 2020 and 2021’s competitions recorded and broadcast on the competition website.

In the competition’s final round on 22 April, Bronwen-Smith beat five other finalists - fellow mezzo-soprano Emma Roberts, sopranos Elena Zamudio and Charlotte Bowden, baritone Joël Terrin and bass baritone Charles Cunliffe – to win the first prize of £12,500.

A recent graduate of the Royal College of Music (RCM), Bronwen-Smith’s accolades include first prize at the 2020 Lieder and 2021 Lies Askonas competitions and the 2021 Leeds Lieder Young Artist/Schubert Song Prize at the Leeds Lieder festival. This year, she will be part of the Glyndebourne Festival Chorus 2022 as well as appearing in the English Touring Opera’s production of Agrippina.

Bronwen-Smith was accompanied by Avishka Edirisinghe, a first-year student and Robert Turnbull Piano Foundation Scholar at the RCM. Edirisinghe also won the competition’s Help Musicians Accompanist Prize.

The competition’s second prize of £6,000 was awarded to RCM International Opera Studio student Emma Roberts, who also won the £5,000 Loveday Song Prize for her performance of Debussy’s Colloque sentimental.

Sir Brian McMaster, former managing director of Welsh National Opera and director of the Edinburgh International Festival, chaired the competition jury which included sopranos, Dame Josephine Barstow and Dame Anne Evans, tenor Ben Johnson, who himself won first prize in the 2008 competition and pianist Sholto Kynoch, founder and artistic director of the Oxford Lieder Festival.

Founded in 1956, the Kathleen Ferrier Awards Competition is held annually in memory of contralto Kathleen Ferrier. You can find a list of previous competition winners here.