“A performer of versatility and persuasiveness” (Clive O’Connell, The Age), soprano Judith Dodsworth is equally at home in opera, oratorio, chamber music, art song, baroque and contemporary music. After completing her schooling in Canberra and graduating with distinction from Canberra School of Music she studied in London and Vienna. During this time she discovered a flair for contemporary and experimental music and drama and worked extensively with such groups as the Arnold Schönberg Chor, Concentus Vocalis Wien and NeuOper Wien, participating in concerts, recordings, operas, international tours and festivals. Currently based in Melbourne, she completed a Masters in Performance at the University of Melbourne where she studied with Merlyn Quaife, and was the recipient of a number of awards including the Mabel Kent and Ormond Exhibition Scholarships.

Her recent operatic roles have included both the title role and Mercedes in OzOpera’s touring production of Carmen in 2005, the Wife in the Australian première of Michael Nyman’s The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat for Operalive, Kate Pinkerton in Madam Butterfly for Melbourne Opera and various roles in new productions and workshops for Chamber Made Opera. In 2004 she created the role of the lead soprano in Opiume, a new “fusion” chamber opera for the Singapore and Hong Kong New Visions Arts Festivals. Engagements for 2006 include the role of Anastasio in Vivaldi’s Giustino and a reprise of Carmen for OzOpera.

Judith has collaborated with Stopera on a number of occasions. In 2002 and 2003 she won critical acclaim for her “hilarious” portrayal of Eugenia in Galuppi’s The Country Philosopher, and in 2003 played the difficult haute contre role of Pygmalion in Cantata, Stopera’s extraordinary staging of two French baroque operas. Other engagements with Stopera have included several recitals and concerts at the Australian National Gallery.

Judith’s musicianship, versatility and commitment to new Australian composition have seen her increasingly in demand as an exponent of new music and she collaborates regularly with a number of prominent composers and ensembles. She has given premières and readings of new stage works by Johanna Selleck (The Quickening, Port Fairy Festival), Nicholas Vines (From the Lip, The Hive, Chamber Made Opera) and Alan John (Through the Looking Glass, OzOpera). Song cycles and chamber works she has premièred include A Season in Hell and I Fell into a Cauldron (Lindsay Brunsdon), Some Words (Nirmali Fenn), Becoming (Johanna Selleck), Love Songs (Robert Cossom), Night Songs, Beyond the Grass Tree Spears (Castlemaine Festival) and Now Touch the Air Softly (Organs of the Ballarat Goldfields Festival) by Calvin Bowman, and she performed Larry Sitsky’s Bone of My Bones for the 2004 Melbourne International Festival. She also performed and recorded one of her own compositions, Transcendence, with Cantorion Cymreig, the Victorian Welsh Male Choir.

As an oratorio soloist she has performed many major works including Bach’s Cantata No. 51, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Handel’s Messiah and Dixit Dominus, the Requiems of Mozart and Fauré, Gounod’s St Cecilia Mass, Charpentier’s Te Deum and Haydn’s Nelson Mass.