The Dutch singer felt she was only using 15% of her voice. But wanting to unlock its rough, raw and even ugly side got her turfed out of Conservatoire. What will Sunday’s Prom audience make of Ivan Fischer’s daughter?
How do you catch the ear of one of today’s leading composers? With your exquisite vibrato? With a three-octave range? In Nora Fischer’s case, you scream. The soprano comes to the Proms on Sunday for the
UK premiere of the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen’s The Only One, a song cycle he wrote especially for her.
“We met when I had a tiny role in his 2016 opera Theatre of the World,” she tells me. “I had a very high note marked to be sung ‘screaming’. I thought “oooh that’s fun. I’ll scream it.” And so at the first rehearsal I did. This was at the Dutch National Opera – very posh and formal and everyone was like, ‘Woah, what’s going on? You don’t do that in the opera house!’ But Andriessen loved it.” The composer, whose 80th birthday is celebrated at this year’s Proms, told the young singer he was going to write her a piece. “I thought, well that’s a very nice compliment but that will never happen,” she says, “and then suddenly here we are! He said: ‘I want everything you can do to be in it!’”