Biography
Described by the Guardian as “especially impressive,” Patricia Auchterlonie is a young Canadian soprano living and working in London. She is a passionate performer of new, experimental and unheard music, equally at home in opera and chamber music. She is interested in innovative uses for the voice, experimental performance practice and cross-arts collaboration as well as more traditional forms of music-making.
Patricia's 2019/2020 work will (COVID-19 permitting!) include recording songs by Param Vir for NMC, performances of Stockhausen's Sternklang with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and recreating her role in Rasmus Zwicki's Duncan House at the KLANG Festival with Plus-Minus Ensemble.
In the operatic world, Patricia has worked with Music Theatre Wales, Tete-a-Tete & workshopped a new piece by Richard Baker at Snape Maltings. She has performed Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot by Maxwell Davies, in Alastair White's techno-fashion opera WEAR at the Bridewell Theatre & in a collaborative project, Anthems for Queer Youth, created with composer Robert Reid Allan & librettist-director Gareth Mattey and was nominated for a Scottish New Music Award in 2019. Traditional opera roles include Dido in Dido and Aeneas, Erste Dame in Die Zauberflöte, and Angéle in Kurt Weill’s Der Zar lässt sich photographieren.
Concert work has included performances in the LSO Festival This Is Rattle, with London Contemporary Music Festival, An Assembly, Borough New Music, Orpheus Sinfonia, Illuminate Women's Music, the Ubu Ensemble, Filthy Lucre, and a recording with ShevaCollection for Naxos. She has been broadcast on BBC Radio Three and Resonance FM's Sound Out. She has performed in venues all across the UK including Wigmore Hall and The Barbican Centre while regularly working in non-traditional performing spaces including Colourspace, the Courtauld Gallery, The Drawing Room and APT Deptford.
She was the 2017/18 Carne Junior Fellow at Trinity Laban and holds a master’s degree from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She is one half of experimental flute-voice duo, teethe. Patricia is also an avid reader, an amateur seamstress and a shameless lover of the banjo (which she plays with enthusiasm rather than skill).
Patricia is grateful to the Carne Trust, the Richard Stapley Trust and private donors for their support of her studies and development as a performer.
In the Press...
"...Patricia Auchterlonie was especially impressive in Harrison Birtwistle’s Nine Settings of Celan."
- Guardian Review of Ades: This is Rattle in 2018
"I have never heard insanity so beautifully rendered as it was by Auchterlonie and Berg, who gave us a version that was as close to perfect as makes no difference... the Soper was transcendent."
- Miles Hedley reviewing Kate Soper's Only the Words Themselves Mean What They Say for the Greenwich Visitor
"It was the first of many occasions during the concert when Auchterlonie’s performance was devastatingly effective, her impassioned delivery proving to be deeply moving... But nothing brought the world to a halt more than the Lament of Isis on the Death of Osiris by... Elisabeth Lutyens. Performed by Patricia Auchterlonie alone, where she had earlier articulated a distressed, fragile lament, now she went to the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, articulating some of the most blistering grief i’ve ever heard... there wasn’t a moment of Lutyens’ music that wasn’t racked with pain, here rendered angry, unfathomable and infinite. A mesmerising, literally stunning performance, that quite rightly received by far the longest and loudest applause."
- 5:4 reviewing Illuminate Women's Music at Birmingham Centrala
"Patricia Auchterlonie, whose admirable consistency of timbre in two settings by Rachmaninov and a less well-known one by Rimsky made a notable impression; all three sung with much charm and natural grace."
- Classical Source reviewing a Barbican Pre-Concert of Russian song