Kitty Whately
Kitty Whately is one of the UK’s most characterful mezzo sopranos of the operatic stage and concert platform, and a highly acclaimed interpreter particularly of contemporary opera and art song. She has performed leading roles in world and UK premieres of opera by Mark Anthony Turnage, Missy Mazzoli, Mark Adamo and Vasco Mandonça, alongside song cycles written especially for her by Jonathan Dove, Sally Beamish, Steven Hough, Juliana Hall and Tarik O’Regan.
Recent and future opera engagements include Michelle Festen (Royal Opera House), Poppea L’Incoronazione di Poppea (The Grange Festival), Jocasta Oedipus Rex (Scottish Opera) and Lyel The Snow Maiden (ETO).
Other recent highlights include Isabelle in Missy Mazzoli’s one-woman opera Song from the Uproar (BBCSO and BBC Singers, Barbican), Dorabella (The Grange Festival), Hermia A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Opéra de Rouen), Pallas The Judgement of Paris (Cambridge Baroque Opera), Hansel Hansel and Gretel and Elvira Don Giovanni (Scottish Opera), Meg in Opera Holland Park’s UK premiere of Little Women, Kate Owen Wingrave (Nancy and GPO), Annina Der Rosenkavalier (Garsington), and The Cunning Little Vixen with the CBSO in Birmingham, Paris, Hamburg and Dortmund.
Kitty is a passionate champion of women composers, and her album Befreit: A Soul Surrendered, with Joseph Middleton, included world premiere recordings of songs by Johanna Müller-Hermann and Margarete Schweikert. In 2025 she releases a complete vocal works of the Anglo-American composer Rebecca Clarke with Anna Tilbrook and Nicholas Phan, as well as a new album of French song with Edwige Herchenroder. She also looks forward to recording Vaughan Williams and his women contemporaries and influencees with William Vann, and Madeleine Dring songs with Julius Drake.
Kitty is the co-founder of the charity SWAP’ra (Supporting Women And Parents in Opera).