These are some of the singers, past and present, whom I admire greatly. If the list looks a little bottom-heavy, it's probably because I'm a mezzo myself and I tend to prefer the lower voice types. Most of my real favorites are singers I discovered in my first phase of enthusiasm for opera, which started about twenty years ago, but many of them have retired or are singing relatively few engagements these days. I missed out on a whole batch when I took a hiatus from intensive opera exposure in the 90s, so I now have a new group of singers to discover.

Many fine singers are missing from this list, but that doesn't necessarily mean I don't like them. It might mean I haven't heard them -- there are plenty that I have no acquaintance with. I tend not to listen to recordings made before about 1960, so many of the names from the earlier part of the twentieth century will be missing. Also I have less acquaintance with the German repertoire than the Italian or French, so there are many singers who specialize in German language music that I will not have heard.

Sopranos:

• Ileana Cotrubas
• Heather Harper
• Karita Mattila
• Felicity Palmer
• Margaret Price
• Luciana Serra
• Cheryl Studer
• Anna Tomowa-Sintow
• Leontina Vaduva
• Carol Vaness
• Deborah Voigt

Mezzo-sopranos and contraltos:

Countertenors:

• James Bowman
• Michael Chance
• David Daniels
• Paul Esswood
• Cortez Mitchell -- a fabulous new countertenor, currently singing with Chanticleer.
• Andreas Scholl

Tenors:

• Joseph Calleja
• Ryland Davies
• Plácido Domingo -- for an account of my trip to Washington to hear him in Idomeneo, click here.
• Juan Diego Flórez
• Bruce Ford -- seen in Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia at the Minnesota Opera, January 2004 and Maria Padilla, March 2005
• Paul Groves
• Anthony Laciura
• Robin Leggate
• Fritz Wunderlich

Baritones and basses:

• Sir Thomas Allen
• Vladimir Chernov
• Thomas Hampson
• Dmitri Hvorostovsky
• Sergei Leiferkus
• Robert Lloyd
• Benjamin Luxon
• Anthony Michaels-Moore
• Sherrill Milnes
• Kurt Moll
• Thomas Quasthoff
• John Shirley-Quirk
• Bryn Terfel
• José van Dam
• Ingvar Wixell
• Giorgio Zancanaro

and another new discovery may be added to the list: Carlos Marín. I've only heard him in one thing, so I'm reserving judgment, but I was very impressed. He sounded to me rather like Vladimir Chernov at the top of his form, and that's a sound I like very much. More Marín would be very welcome.

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