April Cantelo, elegant soprano admired by critics

In 1960 the composer Benjamin Britten was casting for singers to appear at the Aldeburgh Festival in his new work for the English Opera Group, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For the role of Helena, one of the play’s mythological lovers, he settled on April Cantelo, with Marjorie Thomas, George Maran and Thomas Hemsley as Hermia, Lysander and Demetrius, all of them excellent singers.
When the work transferred to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the following year Cantelo, the last survivor of that original quartet, was replaced by Heather Harper, as she was on the 1966 Decca recording. She returned to the role at Sadler’s Wells in 1967 and 1969, “looking and sounding youthfully attractive”, according to Opera magazine. Fortunately, her original contribution had been captured in the BBC’s live radio broadcast, excellently remastered in 2016 by the Testament record label.
Meanwhile, Cantelo was increasingly associated with Malcolm Williamson’s operas. As Beatrice Weston of MI6 in his adaptation of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana (Sadler’s Wells, 1963) she was “in stunning form” noted Opera magazine, adding that “the weight, timing and musical accuracy of her dramatic cry which ends the penultimate scene was quite the most exciting thing in the evening”.
The following year she returned to Aldeburgh, playing Miss Beswick in Williamson’s English Eccentrics based on Edith Sitwell’s book. She also sang Swallow on the recording of his one-act children’s opera The Happy Prince (1965), and was Berthe, a loving but emotionally repressed governess, in the world premiere of his opera The Violins of Saint-Jacques (1966) at Sadler’s Wells.
Elsewhere Cantelo, a tall and elegant blonde, appeared in several Proms between 1958 and 1973. She sang with Robert Tear in the opening concert of the Purcell Room in 1967 accompanied by Raymond Leppard and took part in two of Gerard Hoffnung’s spoofs, Metamorphosis on a Bed-time Theme with the baritone Ian Wallace and Horrortoiro, a play on the Baroque oratorio format in which, going against type, she played Dracula’s daughter.
April Rosemary Cantelo was born into a musical family in Purbrook, Hampshire, in 1928. She was the daughter of Herbert Cantelo, known as Reg, and his wife Marie, or Eve (née Abraham), who were remembered by a friend as “intelligent, cultivated and liberal”.
The family moved to an old Georgian house at Writtle Green, near Chelmsford in Essex, where she played viola in the village orchestra and was educated at Chelmsford Girls School. When war broke out, her parents offered a home to Tilly Cahn, a German-Jewish refugee who had fled Cologne and whose parents were murdered in Auschwitz.
Cantelo also played the piano and sang in the church choir, though her childhood ambition was to be “a research scientist, a medical type”. When someone suggested she audition for “apprentice soprano” at Dartington Hall in Devon she considered it “a very jokey thing”. However, she was successful and received six months training “plus the opportunity to go back to scientific research if I didn’t like singing”, she told the Oakland Tribune while appearing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in San Francisco in 1971.
Back in London she continued her musical studies with the conductor Vilem Tausky and the composer Imogen Holst. She was soon appearing in concert halls with the Amphibian Ensemble, the Deller Consort and the Society of Recorder Players, her “light soprano voice beautifully suited” to the latter’s 18th-century songs, according to a Times review.
During 1948 she joined the chorus of Glyndebourne Opera, whose orchestra that summer included a young clarinettist called Colin Davis who had ambitions to become a conductor. The following year he assembled a group called the Kalmar Orchestra that became associated with the embryonic Chelsea Opera Group, with which Cantelo had some of her first solo roles. She and Davis were married in 1949, the occasion being marked by the Writtle village orchestra with a performance of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, and had two children, Suzanne and Christopher.
In the years following their marriage Cantelo was the main breadwinner and by far the better known of the two, receiving critical praise as Echo in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos and as Barbarina in Le Nozze di Figaro for Glyndebourne. In the British premiere of Hans Werner Henze’s Boulevard Solitude in 1962 she sang appealingly as the courtesan Manon though did not really suggest a vamp. Being what one reviewer called “one of the nicest of ‘nice girls’”, she had a similar problem as Jenny, a prostitute, in Kurt Weill’s satire on capitalism, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1963).
Her husband’s professional fortunes began to improve with his appointment as assistant conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in 1957. However, he became romantically involved with their children’s Iranian au pair and the marriage was dissolved in 1964. Davis, who was knighted in 1980, predeceased her (obituary, April 16, 2013).
Cantelo then spent some time in New Zealand, lecturing at the University of Canterbury and directing Purcell’s The Fairy Queen in 1972. By the middle of that decade she was living near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire and working with Roger Smith, conductor of the Cheltenham Choral Society. After inviting friends round to sing through an opera, a plan emerged for them to perform Beethoven’s Fidelio in Cheltenham Town Hall with full choir, orchestra and professional soloists.
At this point the 18-year-old owner of nearby Highnam Court, who had inherited the 17th-century Gloucestershire manor house from a nephew of the composer Sir Hubert Parry, offered them its use for rehearsal. Highnam had been empty for half a century and was seriously dilapidated, but the singers brought in their own field kitchens and furniture, repeating the exercise four times over the next three years.
When the owner decided to sell in 1977, Smith and Cantelo bought the house with a view to opening a “local Glyndebourne” funded by building 300 retirement homes in the grounds. However, they ran into opposition and after Smith’s death in 1991, aged 56, the house was sold.
In 1993 Cantelo moved to Sutton Courtenay, near Abingdon in Oxfordshire, where two years later she directed the village’s All Saints Singers in a semi-staged performance of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Alyn Shipton, the Times jazz writer who lives nearby, wrote in his memoir: “April’s work … led to some marvellous concerts, culminating in a 2008 performance of Mozart’s version of Handel’s Messiah.” Three years ago she was painted, walking sticks in her hands, by the artist Ruth Swain, who remembered her as “an amazing lady whose voice inspired so many”.
April Cantelo, soprano, was born on April 2, 1928. She died on July 16, 2024, aged 96