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.
Her 2018/19 season has included work with Music Theatre Wales, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Illuminate Women's Music and the premiere of a new work by Nicholas Korth with Orpheus Sinfonia. She has also created new role in a work by Rasmus Zwicki at Tête à Tête and performed as The Writer in Alastair White's techno fashion opera WEAR at the Bridewell Theatre.
In 2017 Patricia performed in the London Symphony Orchestra’s award-winning festival This is Rattle (LSO) presenting Harrison Birtwistle’s 9 Settings of Celan with Richard Baker conducting. She has also performed with An Assembly, London Contemporary Music Festival, Borough New Music, the Ubu Ensemble, Filthy Lucre, and recorded 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.
Operatic roles include Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot by Maxwell Davies, Dido in Dido and Aeneas, Erste Dame in Die Zauberflöte, and Angéle in Weill’s Der Zar lässt sich photographieren. New stage works include a collaborative project, Anthems for Queer Youth, created with Robert Reid Allan, Gareth Mattey and performance collective Savage Parade. Anthems was been nominated for a Scottish New Music Award in 2019.
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 co-artistic director of 2021 Concerts and one half of experimental flute-voice duo, teethe.
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