June Anderson (b1952)

During the following decade Anderson expanded her repertoire to include Elena/La donna del lago (La Scala, 1982), Marie/Mazeppa (Opera Orchestra of New York, 1993), Desdemona/Otello (Verdi) (Los Angeles, 1995), Lucrezia/I due Foscari (Covent Garden, 1995), Rosalinde/Die Fledermaus (Metropolitan, 1995), Joan of Arc/Giovanna d’Arco (New York, Barcelona, Covent Garden, 1996) and Tatiana/Eugene Onegin (Tokyo, 1996). Towards the end of the decade she moved to heavier rôles, singing Norma in Chicago and Elvira/Ernani with the Opera Orchestra of New York, both in 1997, and Leonora/Il trovatore at the Metropolitan in 1998. She spoke of tackling these heavier parts with great clarity in an interview in Opera News in 1998: ‘I didn’t want to do “Normina.” I wanted to do Norma. And Leonora. I didn’t want to sound like a soubrette trying to do these things.’ The process of continuously extending her repertoire continued after 2000 with appearances in Anna Bolena (Pittsburgh, 2000), The Bassarids (Paris, 2005) and Il viaggio a Reims (Monte Carlo, 2005); and with two major Richard Strauss rôles, the Countess in Capriccio (Naples, 2002) and the title part in Daphne (Venice, 2005) of which Max Loppert wrote in Opera magazine: ‘The singing offered countless ravishments: crystalline timbre, clean-cut line-delineation, dead-on-target intonation, awesomely easy projection of one perilously exposed high phrase after another.’

In 2008 Anderson was made a commander of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. The possessor of a pure soprano voice of considerable power and accuracy, Anderson uses this with unfailing musicality and an ability to adapt effortlessly to the musical style of whichever composer she is performing. Her discography is large, and includes complete sound recordings, both formal and informal, as well as desirable video recordings.

Courtesy of David Patmore