A lustrous vocal quality, combined with an alluring, exuberant stage presence, ensured the popularity of the soprano Jill Gomez, who has died aged 83, on both operatic stage and concert platform. When her talent came to the fore in the early 1970s she was hailed by Arthur Jacobs in Opera magazine, along with Josephine Barstow, as “the most exciting of our newer female singers”, while reviews of the time hailed her Governess in Britten’s The Turn of the Screw and Anne Trulove in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress as among the finest. The latter role was one of those she took, along with Mélisande, Calisto and Helena (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), at Glyndebourne, where Gomez enjoyed her first major successes, appearing between 1969 and 1984.
At Covent Garden her roles included Lisa in La Sonnambula, Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Lauretta in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi. English National Opera appearances included War and Peace, where she took the part of Natasha Rostova in the 1984 revival, and, in the same year, the Governess. She also appeared regularly with Scottish Opera, the English Opera Group, Wexford and Kent Opera, and major houses abroad including Frankfurt, Vienna, Zurich, Lyons and Florence.
Recordings documenting her performances in the 1970s demonstrate an immaculately schooled tone and exquisite legato line in Mozart, and well-turned ornamentation with genuine trills in Handel. Later, too, in French repertoire (as indeed in all languages) her emotional warmth and impeccable diction engendered idiomatic and affecting performances. Her recording of Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne, under Vernon Handley, in which the voice sensually enwraps each seamlessly joined phrase, was critically lauded and became a bestseller.
Having grown up in Trinidad, Gomez felt a special affinity for Latin American music, and one of the recordings she most enjoyed making – a pleasure evident in the high-spirited renditions – was South of the Border (1990), a crossover disc of music from the so-called Latin American Songbook, largely featuring numbers written for the silver screen or cabaret in the interwar period. Her razor-sharp articulation is mordantly deployed in Noël Coward’s witty Nina from Argentina, while songs such as La Cucaracha and La Paloma are delivered in captivating style. Jill was born in New Amsterdam, British Guiana (now Guyana), where her father, Albert Gomez, a Spanish Trinidadian, was working as a technologist (later managing director and vice-chairman) for Angostura, the distillers.
Her British mother, Denise (nee Denham), was an actor and broadcaster in Trinidad. She attended St Joseph’s Convent in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, where her musical talents were nurtured by a persuasive and influential nun, Mother Helen de Verteuil, who encouraged her to try opera. When Jill moved to the UK at the age of 13 she studied first at the Royal Academy of Music in London and later the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where her teacher was Walther Gruner.
She then joined the Glyndebourne festival chorus (1966-68). Inevitably, perhaps, her name is invariably linked to a pair of operatic scandals. Her creation of the role of Flora in Michael Tippett’s The Knot Garden (1970) caused a sensation when, in Peter Hall’s production, she became the first female singer to appear topless at Covent Garden.
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