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World-class soprano with an operatic life story

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soprano: Katerina Mina

In a world-renowned soprano THEO PANAYIDES finds an emotional, spiritual woman who has led a fascinating life that might well make an opera tale itself

It starts off dramatic, and gets even more so. It’s Friday afternoon, and I arrive at the Nicosia Hilton to be met by three people. One is hotel manager Evros Stylianou, here to escort his celebrity guests; the second is Cyprus-born, world-renowned soprano Katerina Mina; and the third – a soft-spoken Brit – is her manager and life partner David Buchler. We move to the bar area for the interview – but first, says Katerina unexpectedly, “I’d like to sing for you”.

There’s a piano in the lobby. She sits at the piano – and, without even much in the way of warm-up, launches into Handel’s ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’, a soaring aria with a melancholy edge. The piece itself is sombre and lyrical (I remember it from Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, of all things); you could probably listen to a YouTube version on tinny speakers and still get emotional. Having it sung live, by a world-class voice just a few feet away – the kind of voice that can “cut through a whole orchestra,” as she puts it, and fill a 5,000-seat opera house – is just overpowering. Katerina’s voice scales the song’s peaks of yearning, dips into its sad shady valleys; a crowd gathers, strangers breaking off their conversations and business meetings to approach the piano. “I wasn’t expecting to have an actual audience,” she claims later – but surely she knows the primal pull a beautiful voice can exert on even the dullest spirit. The song ends, the small crowd applauds. I wipe my eyes surreptitiously – and Katerina gives me a little pat on the arm, as if to say ‘I know, I’ve been there’.

Our actual interview threatens to be an anti-climax – but in fact her life has been fascinating, and its present phase is perhaps the most fascinating. Even this trip to Cyprus is a big deal – and indeed I’m lucky to have caught her, having fully expected to be talking on Zoom; she’s been based in Britain since 1993, but is here for a few days to celebrate her birthday (which was on February 6). “I think I was in Cyprus last for my birthday when I was 18. Bearing in mind I’ve just turned 47, this was for me very special.”

profile2Soon after that 18th birthday she applied to the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, got in – albeit as a concert pianist; she made the switch to opera singer in the third year – and never looked back. This was always what she wanted to do – which is odd, since the family in Cyprus had no particular love for classical music. “When I was four, I wanted to do classical ballet,” she recounts, “then when I was six I said to them ‘Can you buy a piano? I want to learn the piano’.” (So much for the Mozart tradition of pushy parents; Katerina was a pushy kid.) It’s almost too perfect – a little girl born with a golden voice, drawn to music for no specific reason that she can recall. A spiritual person (which she is) might even view it as a gift from on high, the universe bestowing its favours in its usual inexplicable fashion.

Maybe – but then you’d have to ask, why would the universe confer such a blessing on someone, then make it so difficult for them to enjoy it? It’s not entirely accurate to say she ‘never looked back’, indeed her life might make a pretty good opera libretto in its own right. All the ingredients are there for high drama: early acclaim – she won prizes at two singing competitions months after graduation – then a cancer diagnosis at 24, years of chemo and painful rehab, a marriage and divorce, years of being on her own, more mysterious illness in her 40s…

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Katerina now, at 47 years and a few days, sitting opposite me in the bar of the Hilton, is poised and striking, immaculately dressed and turned out. Her eyes are green, her nails a vivid red; her speaking voice is soft and low, which is mostly on purpose. It’s a good idea “to allow the larynx to be in a relaxed position,” she explains. “The singing is a continuation of the speaking.” Her elegant look is deliberate too; unlike musicians, whose appearance is largely irrelevant, opera singers are always auditioning – both literally and also in the sense that they’re selling themselves, not just the voice but their presence and temperament. It’s a stressful profession in general, “it’s stressful because of its nature, because the instrument is within us. When you go onstage as a pianist, you know you’ve got your instrument. It’s not going to break, it’s fixed, it’s been tuned, it’s going to be fine. You need to worry about the fingers”. As a singer, however, “sometimes you don’t know how it will behave on the night”.

profile3Being a singer means staking your livelihood on a fragile apparatus, a picayune detail of the human body – “two very small muscles, the vocal folds” – that’s vulnerable to everything from dust to alcohol to the common cold. Unsurprisingly, many singers get a little paranoid; Pavarotti, for instance, “couldn’t go onstage unless he took his special bonbons. What were these bonbons? They had nothing in them. Eventually, it was like a placebo”. And Katerina herself? Does she have any pre-performance rituals, to stave off the fear of her voice collapsing?

“I would say, 99 per cent of the time,” she replies, “I take a few minutes with myself in my dressing room – or if it’s hectic I’ll do it before, on my way – and just connect with my higher self. I don’t know what this means to you, or the readers, but I take a few moments to connect with my higher self, and to ask specific things that I need on the night.” Sounds a lot like prayer – and indeed her phrasing is often explicitly spiritual, with talk of “connecting with my soul” and becoming “the vessel where you connect with the universe”.

She wasn’t always like this, she admits – and indeed she has a more rugged side. As a little girl she was very prim and poised, with her music and her classical ballet – but then she’d go out and play football with the boys all afternoon, getting mucky and muddy. Her hobbies now include cooking and baking – but also racing fast cars and driving around on a racetrack (alas, she seldom has time to do it properly). She’s not just an opera singer, she’s also a marketing and business development director at a big Mayfair firm… But we’re jumping ahead again. The point is that she wasn’t always so spiritual, or keenly aware of her gift; experience played a role too.

The first experience, as already mentioned, came in her mid-20s, when she noticed unusual lumps on her neck while practising – a swelling of the lymph nodes, and an early symptom of blood cancer. (Being a singer actually helped catch it early; she was always checking her throat for signs of inflammation.) The cancer was curable – but “everything stopped”, of course, and she also suffered severe side effects from the chemo: “I would get these attacks in one part of my body – the right-hand side, starting from the shoulder, and eventually the whole body would be paralysed. It took eight whole years to feel normal”. She recalls her ex-husband having to help her wash and dress, and rushing her to hospital – and she doesn’t say if these stresses contributed to the breakdown of the marriage but they did divorce, in any case, in 2011, another “big blow” as she puts it.

Meanwhile she was trying to carve out a career, now a decade late and competing against younger people – though singers actually tend to peak later, and Katerina herself is a ‘spinto soprano’ (a heavier, more dramatic voice than a lyric soprano) which also helps. Her CV includes a number of achievements from those years. She sang at the closing ceremony of astronomy conference Starmus in Tenerife in 2014, following a speech delivered by none other than the late Stephen Hawking; she toured Japan (in Cosi Fan Tutte) and performed all over the world, from Moscow to Mexico. Still, another ‘experience’ awaited: “When I turned 40, I nearly died and nobody knew what from,” she recalls grimly. “I was slowly poisoned by carbon monoxide in my own apartment”. The cause was a faulty boiler, leaking for several months and making her progressively sicker; her face swelled, she looked like she’d been punched, “eventually I was so sick I wasn’t able to walk”. Only an astute engineer – who came to check the boiler, and recommended that she take a blood test – saved her from what might’ve been a premature curtain.

It’s not that Katerina Mina’s life has been uniquely difficult. “Every single one of us carries their own cross,” she says equably. “It is what it is.” It’s just that she was blessed with so much, the gift of a magical voice, the power to mesmerise strangers – in concert halls, or indeed hotel lobbies – so a certain frustration with the obstacles placed in her path is perhaps inevitable. She is, after all, a singer, “I’m emotional, so I’m sensitive”; the drama in that voice spills over into real life as well. “We can be quite temperamental, we singers… It’s very good for the stage – it’s very good for my type of voice, to have that temperament. But it’s not always good when you’re with human beings, and not onstage.” Selfishness, rudeness, all the less attractive everyday traits make her furious (though she tries to stay calm) – and of course there’s life itself, the years piling up along with manifold regrets, rejections, things still undone.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m running out of time,” she admits; but time, it turns out, can be generous too. Music was always her métier, there was never a Plan B – but then a Plan B unexpectedly appeared, in her mid-40s. This is where David Buchler comes in, the soft-spoken Brit who’s not just Katerina’s manager (for the past two and a half years), not just her partner (for the past year) but also a businessman, chairman of the aforementioned Mayfair firm, Buchler Phillips.

David is a very big cheese in the field of corporate restructuring and recovery – but he’s also a man who follows his passions: he was vice-chairman of Tottenham Hotspur for five years, and (more to the point) deputy chairman of the English National Opera for 10. Their relationship seems to have given Katerina a new impetus (David also turned 70 on New Year’s Eve; but she says she barely notices the age gap) – not just because she was alone for so many years, and ready for a new man in her life, but also because, though successful, she appears to have grown slightly weary. Two years ago, when Covid struck, she’d actually decided to move back to Cyprus – “I’m actually ready to come back” – but instead David persuaded her to try a part-time job with his firm (it was win-win: the office was depleted due to lockdown) and she thrived, settling into “a dual professional life” that’s become quite fulfilling. She’s even started playing golf, which may be a corporate step too far – though she does plan to tip the balance back to music in 2022, starting with the Stockholm Cultural Awards (postponed from 2020) where she’ll hopefully be receiving a prize this month.

“So thank you for catching me at a very important time in my life!” smiles Katerina – and it’s looking like she’s going to be a strong finisher, middle age having ushered in new plans, a new partner, even a new performance style (she’s reconnected with her piano playing during the pandemic, training herself to play and sing at the same time like she did at the Hilton). “Now, in my mid-40s, I feel at home with my voice,” she adds – and now, I suspect, more than ever, she’s also aware of what a miracle that voice is, how it connects with her ‘higher self’, and how every opportunity must be taken to honour and celebrate it. Maybe that’s why she sang for me.

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