Anne Sharp

Anne Sharp (24 October 1916 – 25 August 2011) was a Scottish coloratura soprano particularly associated with the operas of Benjamin Britten.

Background and education Anne Smellie Graham Sharp was born in Motherwell, Lanarkshire, the eighth and youngest child in a family of keen amateur musicians. Her father was an engineer in the steel industry, and also an amateur singer and choirmaster. She attended Glencairn Primary School and Dalziel High School in Motherwell. After leaving school she worked as a secretary while taking private singing lessons, and in 1941 she began studying at the Scottish National Academy of Music in Glasgow, winning the Jean Highgate singing scholarship in 1943. During her years of study, which coincided with the Second World War, she also sang in the choir of Glasgow Cathedral. She gained the Performer's Diploma in Solo Singing from what was by then the Royal Scottish Academy of Music in 1944, and similar diplomas awarded by Trinity College London and The Royal Academy of Music in 1946. Sharp, who attended the Glasgow audition, was one of seven Scots who were successful. A contemporary newspaper article reported: Able to pass as a teenager even in her thirties,

She created the roles of (13-year-old) Cis Woodger in Albert Herring and Molly Brazen in Britten's 1948 adaptation of The Beggar's Opera, as well as Juliet Brook in The Little Sweep, a part written for her by Britten. In the play Let's Make an Opera! which precedes The Little Sweep, in which the characters were named for the original cast members, "Annie Dougall" (a bank clerk) who takes the part of the 14-year-old Juliet was originally played as a Scots girl, with the original libretto containing a number of Scots expressions for that character. Britten initially conceived the role of Polly Peachum in The Beggar's Opera for Sharp, but while composing the opera changed his concept of the character to a mezzo-soprano role.

Other performances during this period included the soprano solo parts in Bach's Mass in B minor, Handel's Messiah and A German Requiem by Brahms, and solo recitals for the BBC Third Programme including Handel's Lusinghe piu care and "Ständchen" by Richard Straus. Operatic roles included the Queen of the Night in Mozart's The Magic Flute and Micaëla in a concert performance of Bizet's Carmen. She created the title role in Lawrance Collingwood's little-known opera The Death of Tintagiles, at its only performance in April 1950.

Vocal quality Elisabeth Parry, a contemporary in the English Opera Group, described Sharp as having "... a lovely natural very high soprano voice, which never seemed to give her any problem. In our digs we used to tease her because she could get out of bed in the morning and lie in the bath singing up to E in alt."

Marriage and later life In December 1950, Sharp married Rev. James Lyon Kerr, a Church of Scotland minister. The 1949 BBC archive recording of Let's Make an Opera! with Anne Sharp in the dual role of Anne Dougall and Juliet Brook is not commercially available.