Anna Harvey

British mezzo-soprano Anna Harvey specializes in German opera and has been active in Germany as well as her home country. She has also appeared with many leading early music ensembles. Harvey was born in Sheffield, England, in the late 1980s and grew up in the city's Broomhill area. She was the youngest of four children and is her family's first professional musician. Her father was enthusiastic about music and introduced her to genres from classical to folk rock via recordings. Harvey sang in school choirs and also played the violin and recorder. Glimpses of the musical world beyond Sheffield came when she joined the City of Sheffield Youth Orchestra and the choir Cantores Novae, both of which toured widely. At 15, she discovered opera, and the following year, she landed a role in a musical adaptation of the Berlie Doherty book Daughters of the Sea. She appeared in several school musical productions, and at Cambridge University, she gravitated toward vocal msuic. Harvey went on for further studies at the Royal Academy of Music, where she won Russian and English song prizes. Early in her career, she notched wins at the Paris Opera Competition and the London Bach Singers Prize competition, as well as Oratorio and Audience Prizes at the International Vocal Competition in s'-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands. Harvey made her recording debut in 2011 with an appearance on rock songwriter Nick Lowe's The Old Magic. Her classical debut came in 2016 on a Royal Philharmonic Orchestra recording of Haydn's Mass in Time of War, Hob. 22/9. Harvey's appearances in the late 2010s were divided between traditional and early music repertory. She appeared at top halls, including the Palais Garnier in Paris, Lincoln Center in New York, and the Wigmore, Barbican, Royal Festival, and Royal Albert Halls in London, and in 2016, she performed at the Last Night of the BBC Proms. Harvey's concert appearances included not only those with leading symphony orchestras but those with early music groups, such as The English Concert, the Gabrieli Consort, and Arcangelo, on whose 2018 recording of Marc-Antoine Charpentier's Leçons de Ténèbres she appeared. In 2018, Harvey became resident solist at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf, Germany, where she took up residence and has sung a variety of parts, including the "pants" role of Hänsel in Engelbert Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel. In 2020, Harvey was heard as Floßhilde on the Deutsche Oper am Rhein's recording of Wagner's Das Rheingold, and in 2022, she made her solo recording debut, accompanied by Mark Austin, with the album Songs by Warlock & Howe on the Rubicon label.
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