Kathleen Ferrier Awards, Wigmore Hall, review: 'Stratospherically high' standards

The entrants of this year's Kathleen Ferrier Awards are singers to watch out for

The four winners of the Kathleen Ferrier Awards: James Newby, Alessandro Fisher, Bianca Andrew, Ashok Gupta (Robert Piwko)

To sit through this year’s Kathleen Ferrier Awards final was to feel like the Dodo in Alice in Wonderland – ‘Everybody has won, all must have prizes’. Every year this competition sifts out the young stars of tomorrow – Victoria Wood’s mezzo-soprano daughter Grace Durham was a semi-finalist – but never in my experience have the standards been so stratospherically high. The judges themselves acknowledged this problem, by awarding two equal first prizes to baritone James Newby and tenor Alessandro Fisher.

Newby’s Papageno's Aria was intensely idiomatic, the sad clown incarnate, and he invested in Erlkonig with dark dramatic force, while his account of Butterworth’s Is My Team Ploughing was exquisitely nuanced. Fisher’s performance was supremely accomplished, delivering songs in French, Russian, German, and Italian with equal ease – and his high notes were floated with exceptional grace. Meanwhile New Zealander Bianca Andrew carried off the Song Prize for a provocatively brilliant cabaret number, and Ashok Gupta’s winning of the Accompanist’s Prize was well deserved, but the other five pianists were in virtually the same class.

Some now very famous singers started their careers by entering but failing to win this competition: sopranos Nardus Williams, Anna Rajah, and He Wu – each unforgettable in their own way – are singers I will be now looking out for.