British soprano Louise Alder has firmly established herself as “an instinctive singing-actress” (The Arts Desk) and “a terrific talent, combining a big, lustrous voice with flawless intonation and keen intelligence” (The Times). A singer of unusual versatility, she moves between opera, the concert platform, and the recital room with equal authority, and appears at the world’s leading houses and halls: the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; the Metropolitan Opera; Wiener Staatsoper; Bayerische Staatsoper; Opernhaus Zürich; Glyndebourne Festival; Carnegie Hall; and Wigmore Hall, where she held a widely acclaimed artistic residency in 2024. In 2025 she was the soprano soloist at the Last Night of the BBC Proms, the first British soprano to appear at the event in over a decade.
Mozart is at the centre of her operatic work, and she has sung Susanna, Fiordiligi, the Contessa, Donna Anna, and Zerlina for the Royal Opera House, Wiener Staatsoper, Bayerische Staatsoper, Opernhaus Zürich, Glyndebourne, and Teatro Real, Madrid. Strauss and Handel form the other two pillars: Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier and Zdenka in Arabella, and the title roles in Semele and Theodora alongside Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare. Her repertoire extends to Micaëla in Carmen, Anne Trulove in The Rake’s Progress, Gretel, and Marzelline.
On the concert platform she is a regular guest of orchestras including the Berlin Philharmonic under Kirill Petrenko, the London Symphony Orchestra and the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks under Sir Simon Rattle, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Czech Philharmonic, the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra. Her core concert repertoire runs from Bach’s St Matthew Passion, Handel’s Messiah, and Haydn’s The Creation through Mahler’s Second and Fourth Symphonies, Beethoven’s Ninth, and Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem to Strauss’s Four Last Songs and Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne. She has toured Giulio Cesare with The English Concert to the Barbican and across North America, culminating at Carnegie Hall.
A committed recitalist, Alder has partnered tenor Mauro Peter and pianist Joseph Middleton in Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch at Leeds Lieder, Wigmore Hall, and the Musikverein in Vienna, and appears with Middleton at the Oxford International Song Festival, Snape Maltings, Madrid’s Fundación Juan March, the Fundación Privada Victoria de los Ángeles in Barcelona, and in Schwarzenberg, Helsinki, and Stockholm.
Her discography includes Chère Nuit: French Songs and The Russian Connection (both Chandos), the Strauss Lieder disc Through Life and Love with Joseph Middleton (Orchid Classics), the title role in Theodora with Arcangelo (Alpha Classics), Lucia in The Rape of Lucretia (Opus Arte/Glyndebourne), and Silandra in Cesti’s L’Orontea (OEHMS Classics/Oper Frankfurt).
A former member of the ensemble at Oper Frankfurt, Alder studied at the Royal College of Music’s International Opera School, where she was the inaugural Kiri Te Kanawa Scholar. She won the Young Singer Award at the 2017 International Opera Awards, the Dame Joan Sutherland Audience Prize at the 2017 Cardiff Singer of the World Competition, and the inaugural Young British Soloists’ Competition in 2015, and received Glyndebourne’s John Christie Award in 2014.
