Patricia Kern

Died 19 October 2015

PATRICIA Kern, who has died aged 88, was one of Scottish Opera's great early stars, a mezzo-soprano of superb aplomb, technical finesse, and ability to characterise with total assurance the many roles she sang for the company, from Rossini's Cinderella (La Cenerentola) in 1969 to Kirstie in Robin Orr's operatic adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston at the Edinburgh Festival six years later.

For her, as well as for Scottish Opera, these were special years, impressively concentrated in their musical flair and excellence, and splendidly displaying how fully she could inhabit every role she sang.

Though mezzo-sopranos are seldom stars in the same sense as sopranos, Rossini (like Bizet in Carmen) had a startling genius for placing them in leading roles, which the young Patricia Kern soon made the most of. The Rossini version of Perrault's Cinderella fairy-tale was more remarkable for its touching humanity (which most productions fail to capture) than for its employment of magical effects in telling the tale of rags to riches.

In Colin Graham's truthful Scottish Opera production - which told how goodness and virtue, rather than the glamour of wealth and rank, are what bring loving hearts together - Patricia Kern conveyed these essentials to perfection.

Though not a glamorous personality off-stage, she was a real coloratura mezzo (a voice of rare agility and colour, deeper than that of a soprano) and possessed the warm beauty and radiance of tone that made her the singer she was.

Cinderella's melancholy loneliness in Act One and the shimmering smoothness of her scales and intricate decorations of the big rondo finale to Act Two were conveyed with equal ease.

Though it was her first appearance with Scottish Opera, it was not her Scottish debut. By the middle 1960s she had already appeared as an adorable Dorabella in a Sadler's Wells touring production of Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte conducted by Colin Davis. Sadler's Wells, now English National Opera, was her parent company, in which she rose to fame, and Scottish Opera was quick to see her potential as one of its assets at a time when her voice was in perfect fettle.

Colin Graham's production, exquisitely designed by the great Emanuele Luzzati, was first staged only in Edinburgh as part of the company's first Christmas season, for which the Scottish Arts Council had been persuaded, reluctantly, to provide financial backing as a step towards Scottish Opera's ambition to achieve full-time status.

With Miss Kern heading the cast, the 10-day season - also incorporating a revival of Britten's Albert Herring - was a success, attracting supporters from all over Scotland, although when the production was revived the following spring, with the title-role shared by two other singers, audiences dwindled.

Kern had been the original lure, and she went on to sing what proved to be her greatest role across Europe, Canada and the United States as well as Britain.

What mattered here in Scotland, however, was that she had become part of a team in which she would be seen in another of Rossini's most alluring parts, Rosina in The Barber of Seville. She was also a spitfire Hermia in a striking new production of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and, in the rest of the company's expanding Britten cycle, she was a haunting Lucretia in The Rape of Lucretia and a notable Mrs Grose in a revival of The Turn of the Screw.

But she sang more than Britten. Her tragic Ottavia in Anthony Besch's production of Monteverdi's Coronation of Poppea was no less special and, later, her portrayal of Genevieve, the mother of Pelleas and Golaud in Debussy's Pelleas and Mrlisander (again with Colin Grham as director) was a vivid cameo.

When the company launched its ambitious cycle of four new full-length Scottish operas in 1974 (a daring development in its progress) she was again in the middle of things, appearing in two of them, Iain Hamilton's demanding Roman opera, The Catiline Conspiracy, and Robin Orr's Hermiston, in important roles. Unveiled at the Edinburgh Festival, Hermiston went on to be seen at Aldeburgh and was one of the company's major early successes. In all, Patricia Kern sang 13 roles in Scotland, most of them for Scottish Opera.

Born in Swansea in South Wales, she was a pupil of Parry Jones at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, and trained with the little Opera for All touring company, which also operated in Scotland.

At Sadler's Wells she added Isolier in Count Ory, Isabella in The Italian Girl in Algiers and Pippa in The Thieving Magpie to her Rossini repertoire, also singing Cherubino in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro ("trouser" roles were an early speciality), Hansel in Hansel and Gretel, and creating the role of Josephine in Malcolm Williamson's The Violins of St Jacques.

Her Covent Garden debut was as Zerlina in Don Giovanni in 1967. In later life she was a distinguished voice teacher at Toronto University.

CONRAD WILSON