Janet Coster is an English operatic mezzo-soprano.
Born in London, the daughter of a London Transport employee, Coster studied at the Guildhall School of Music and privately with Eva Turner. In the 1960s she undertook a number of roles at Covent Garden including the boy in the 1966 production of Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov with Boris Christoff in the title role.
Dame Eva Turner, was an English dramatic soprano with an international reputation. Her strong, steady and well-trained voice was renowned for its clarion power in Italian and German operatic roles.
The Royal Opera House (ROH) is an opera house and major performing arts venue in Covent Garden, central London. The large building is often referred to as simply "Covent Garden", after a previous use of the site of the opera house's original construction in 1732. It is the home of The Royal Opera, The Royal Ballet, and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. Originally called the Theatre Royal, it served primarily as a playhouse for the first hundred years of its history. In 1734, the first ballet was presented. A year later, Handel's first season of operas began. Many of his operas and oratorios were specifically written for Covent Garden and had their premieres there.
Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky was a Russian composer, one of the group known as "The Five". He was an innovator of Russian music in the romantic period. He strove to achieve a uniquely Russian musical identity, often in deliberate defiance of the established conventions of Western music.
Contents
In 1969 Coster joined the roster of principal artists at the Cologne Opera, making her debut there as Vitellia in a new production of Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito . At that time this particular Mozart opera was rarely performed and the production, directed by Jean Pierre Ponnelle, received high acclaim from music critics internationally.
La clemenza di Tito, K. 621, is an opera seria in two acts composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to an Italian libretto by Caterino Mazzolà, after Pietro Metastasio. It was started after the bulk of Die Zauberflöte, the last opera that Mozart worked on, was already written. The work premiered on 6 September 1791 at the Estates Theatre in Prague.
In 1975 she sang a brilliant Eboli in the Cologne Opera's production of Verdi's "Don Carlos".
She also sang with Welsh National Opera to great acclaim in roles such as Azucena in Trovatore.
Over the next decade she sang a wide number of roles at this theatre and other German houses. Returning to Britain she was Amneris in Aida for the English National Opera and undertook a considerable amount of Broadcasting for the BBC.
Aida is an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni. Set in the Old Kingdom of Egypt, it was commissioned by Cairo's Khedivial Opera House and had its première there on 24 December 1871, in a performance conducted by Giovanni Bottesini. Today the work holds a central place in the operatic canon, receiving performances every year around the world; at New York's Metropolitan Opera alone, Aida has been sung more than 1,100 times since 1886. Ghislanzoni's scheme follows a scenario often attributed to the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette, but Verdi biographer Mary Jane Phillips-Matz argues that the source is actually Temistocle Solera.
English National Opera (ENO) is an opera company based in London, resident at the London Coliseum in St Martin's Lane. It is one of the two principal opera companies in London, along with The Royal Opera, Covent Garden. ENO's productions are sung in English.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters are at Broadcasting House in Westminster, London, and it is the world's oldest national broadcasting organisation and the largest broadcaster in the world by number of employees. It employs over 20,950 staff in total, 16,672 of whom are in public sector broadcasting. The total number of staff is 35,402 when part-time, flexible, and fixed-contract staff are included.
Her sister Tammy St. John had some success as a popular singer.
