I'm very pro presenting the best music I can to the widest audience possible. |
It was really lovely to find another way to express music. I found that singing and dancing have such a lot in common. |
Just walking along Shaftesbury Avenue gave me such a buzz - it still does - and communicating with an audience through music is still the biggest thrill in the world. |
Music is there to access those dark emotional corners that we don't normally get too close to. |
Nobody inspired me more than Julie Andrews, who is a classically trained soprano herself. |
One of the problems that we face through the media attention that these artists receive is that there has been an awful lot of talk about opera and classical music being elite and being for an elitist group. |
Opera is credible drama now, and it costs less than going to a football match. What have you got to lose? |
Seeing that made me understand how profound the drama of opera was and how music theatre is the most powerful audiovisual form there is. |
Singing is an arduous business and it needs sacrifices. |
So between my mother playing two-part inventions by Bach on the piano and my dad singing Ivor Novello, I became what I am today. |
The community that underpinned my upbringing was born from the pits and the steelworks and the railways. |
The musical heritage of Yorkshire is deep and wide. |
There are a lot of unseen elements to having a successful singing career. |
To tell you the truth, I never listen to opera at home. |
What people really should be able to be confident in is that the standards of music- making that classically trained musicians present is elite, it is the best and all of us as artists should be committed to that. |