Katherine Jenkins

November 2014

WHILE the eyes of the world were focusing on the George Clooney/Amal Alamuddin wedding in Venice, Katherine Jenkins was also tying the knot, to New Yorker Andrew Levitas at Hampton Court Palace.
It was a private affair, with just 200 guests, and there were no photo sales to glossy magazines.
“It’s amazing, I’m incredibly happy, I love being a wife... it’s the best thing in the world,” says the 34-year-old mezzo soprano.
“It’s a very happy time.”
Give it 15 years and he’ll be driving you up the wall.
“Oh please,” she laughs. “I don’t want to hear that.”
She’s in the back of a car heading from York to... she’s not sure. It’s a promotional tour of the UK to push a new album, Home Sweet Home and the corresponding theatre tour that lands at the Royal Concert Hall on Valentine’s Day.

That date generated a few fan suggestions on Twitter that she should run a competition to win a romantic meal with her.
“I’m not sure what Andrew would say about that”, she laughs, of her new husband, who is also in the entertainment industry, as a film director, producer and actor.
She has said that he likes her music.
“Well, he’s got to, hasn’t he? He’d be in trouble if he didn’t.”
The couple have made their home in London, where Jenkins moved from Wales at the age of 18 to study at the Royal College of Music.
Will they move to New York in the future?
“No,” she says firmly.
“We’re staying in the UK. I feel really proud of where I come from, my sister’s just had a baby and all my family are here. It’s going to be nice to have family in New York to go and visit but I’m staying in the UK.”
Home Sweet Home, indeed - although the album is more about her return to her original record label, Decca, where her career started ten years ago.

“In some way it’s unbelievable that I’ve been lucky enough to make ten albums. Reaching that landmark made me look back. Along the way I tried to bring different genres of music into the classical sphere but I think the music I enjoyed the most, and suited me most, was the sort I was making on my first few albums.
“I’ve still got a desire to make classical music accessible and Decca really understand classical crossover.”
She adds: “I’ve gone full circle in a way. Musically I’ve come home.”
Songs on the new album, released on November 17, include World In Union, We Are The Champions, Barcelona (with Alfie Boe), Silent Night and How Great Thou Art.
“The songs were chosen for having a classical footing but they had to be anthemic and inspirational... will they make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end?” says Jenkins, who was teaching singing when she signed to Decca.
“They are songs that everybody will know. Even if you don’t know the composer you’ll know the tune.”

In terms of the songs she’ll sing on the tour, she took to Twitter to ask her fans for requests.
“Somebody said an AC/DC song. I was meaning the songs from my ten albums but that did make me laugh.”

When Jenkins started out, there were no other female classical crossover singers but many have since followed, including Nottinghamshire’s Lucy Kay, who came second on Britain’s Got Talent and Victoria Gray, who had a reasonable level of success with the group Amore.
What advice does she have for others who want to follow in her footsteps?
“Get as much experience as you can, join choirs, get involved in amateur productions of shows, enter competitions... because you have to be prepared for the opportunity when it comes.
“And work hard. I’m not scared of hard work and being tired and that kind of stuff. That’s what you’ve got to put into it.”
Jenkins, who music tastes range from Maria Callas and Judy Garland, to Beyonce, Rihanna, Sam Smith and Adele, will be spending her first Christmas as a married woman back in Wales.
“Family is very important to me and we’re very traditional at Christmas so I’ll be at home with mam. It will be my first as a wife but also my first as an aunty; my sister had a baby five months ago. I’m excited about that.”
Which begs the question...?
“Oh gosh! It’s something I really want, I’ve always said that but it’ll be when I can take a little bit of a break.”
Since her breakthrough ten years ago, Jenkins has sold eight million albums, won numerous awards, performed all over the world, been awarded an OBE and become a wife. How has she changed as a person in that time?
“Like anybody, I’m a bit more confident, I feel I’ve learned my job a lot more and I’m definitely more settled within myself.
“Yes, I live a very different lifestyle but I don’t think I’ve changed that much as a person.”

Tickets to see Katherine Jenkins at the Royal Concert Hall on Saturday, February 14 are £29.50- £55 from the box office, call 0115 989 5555 or go to trch.co.uk. Meet and greet packages are also available priced at £85 and £135.

Victoria Gray

July 2014

IT was always meant to be a bit of a giggle; a chance to taste fame, make a few quid and have fun.

But when Bilsthorpe’s Victoria Gray now looks back on the two years with Amore, a classical crossover - or ‘popera’ - group based in London, she knows that her heart lay elsewhere.

“It was great fun, don’t get me wrong,” says the 27-year-old, who now lives in Burton Joyce with her fiance.

“But that showbiz world wasn’t really me. There was a thing I used to call Meerkat syndrome that people used to do at celebrity parties. You’d be talking to them and they’d be constantly bobbing up and down and looking around the room for celebrities.

“I’d couldn’t wait to get back home and get in my onesie,” she adds with a laugh.

Amore were four members of the Royal College of Music, from where Victoria graduated with an MA in Performance, the end of eight years of study.

Her plan was always to be an opera singer but the opportunity for a bit of fun and possible fame came along when they were signed to major record label, Universal.

Highlights over the past two years include performing on a boat on the Thames in front of the Queen as part of her Diamond Jubilee celebrations and singing Abide With Me and the National Anthem at last year’s FA Cup Final between Manchester City and Wigan Athletic, where 82,000 people packed out Wembley Stadium.

Amore also opened shows for Katherine Jenkins and Russell Watson, two of the biggest classical crossover artist in the UK. There has been modelling for GC Watches, that included a starring role in a TV campaign.

“I’m still doing that,” says Victoria.

And various celebrity parties.

“We did a lot with Samuel L Jackson, performing at his events. They were the best parties. He loved classical music and we’d sing before dinner, then join everyone else for the meal. We were on a table with comedian Stephen K Amos at one of them and he was hilarious. And Ron Weasley was on the next table.

“Will Smith was a lovely guy. We did a lot for a charity called WellChild, which is one the Prince Harry’s main charities. We performed at the annual Helping Hands Ball which was star-studded.”

She adds: “I found that the loveliest people were the genuinely talented ones. The reality TV stars were the ones with an ego and attitude.”

All four members of Amore disbanded the group this year to work on solo projects.

“We missed opera and being part of a production,” says Victoria who moved back to Nottinghamshire six months ago with fiance Sam Ogrizovic, the Kimberley Cricket Club captain. The couple will tie the knot in September.

“I haven’t missed London once,” she admits.

Her focus now is to train with the English National Opera, but she needs to raise £2,000 to do so.

“You work with the best directors and conductors; it’s really exciting.

“I was worried that being from the crossover world they wouldn’t take me seriously because they are two very different worlds. All of us in Amore went into it quite naively thinking we could straddle both worlds but it became increasingly impossible when we had a record company who wanted us to sing songs out of our comfort zone.”

She means mainstream songs given the opera treatment.

She will be doing a few of them as part of her first solo concert tomorrow night, mixed in with more authentic opera songs.

“It’s more nerve-wracking than the FA Cup Final,” she says of the concert at Samworth Church Academy in Mansfield.

“Although there were so many people in Wembley Stadium, you couldn’t see their faces. But singing to people you know, sat right in front of you, is really hard.”

The venue is where Mansfield girls’ choir Cantamus used to rehearse. Victoria joined while still at school and sang with them all over the world.

Another was Lucy Kay, the Notts-raised runner up of this year’s Britain’s Got Talent.

“She’s a lovely girl and she’s done so well,” says Victoria.

“I saw her a couple of weeks ago and we sang together.”

That was at the memorial concert in Mansfield for Cantamus founder Pamela Cook, who died last year.

“I told her that if she needed any advice about the celebrity world then I was there for her. Because it is a shock to the system. It’s not for the faint-hearted. It can be quite brutal.”

She describes the concert as “incredible night.

Says Victoria: “Imagine 400 girls singing Raise Me Up together. It gives me goosebumps thinking about it now.

“Miss Cook was the biggest musical inspiration in my life. I still miss her every day.”

Her long-term ambitions are to sing on all the major opera stages around the world and it’s a journey she’s excited about embarking on once again.

“I want to be part of that buzz again; being part of a production and watching it go from an idea to the stage.

“Amore was amazing. I had two years doing things I never thought I’d do. But now I feel like I’m home and doing the thing I first fell in love with.”

Victoria Gray presents Summer Serenades at Samworth Church Academy in Mansfield tomorrow from 6pm, with guest Natalie Montakhab. Tickets are £12, call 01623 822567 or email maggie.magent@btinternet.com.   

Amore (Victoria Gray)

April 2012

IN honour of Alvin Stardust, another musical graduate of the Minster School in Newark, it had been suggested (by me) that Victoria Gray adopt the name Victoria Starburst. “Oh I do remember that,” says the 24-year-old from Bilsthorpe of our conversation two years ago.

She’d never heard of the My Coo-Ca-Choo hitmaker. She still doesn’t know who he is.

But then again, Victoria moves in different music circles.

The blonde soprano was a member of Cantamus, the all-girl choir based in Mansfield, travelling to Germany, Italy and China, where, in 2007, they were crowned Olympic Champions. Victoria was also the first singer to win The Nottingham Young Musician Competition, in 2005.

She’s since been studying at the Royal College of Music in London, where she met the other three members of the new opera group, Amore, who signed a six-album deal earlier this year.

“It all happened through a really lucky break. Someone at the college was in a Starbucks next to the Warner offices. And he overheard a conversation between two senior managers from the label, saying they were struggling to find a new opera group. He reported back to us and told us to contact Warner, we auditioned for them and it’s been a bit of whirlwind ever since.”

The group was created by the four friends for the audition.

“Because we were mates and have sung together before we have a natural chemistry.”

Amore also features baritone Peter Brathwaite, tenor David Webb and soprano Monica McGhee.

In recent weeks the quartet have appeared on Sky News, BBC Breakfast News and been touted in the national press as: “the next big opera band” (The Times).

Their debut album, Stand Together, is due out next month on the same label as Green Day, Muse and Michael Bublé.

The album is produced by Simon Franglen, who has worked with Celine Dion, Whitney Houston, Katherine Jenkins, Rolando Villazon and Barbra Streisand.

In between promoting for that, Victoria has the final few weeks of her eight-year course at the Royal College of Music to finish.

They’ve already confirmed TV appearances during the Serenading Britain campaign including on BBC2, closing the Chelsea Flower Show, ITV1’s This Morning and Songs of Praise.

Excuse the cliché but it is a dream come true for her.

“When I was 15 and I saw the Classical Brits on television I vowed that by the time I was 25 I would be performing on it.

“And that looks like it will be happening this year.”

Back in Bilsthorpe, her parents are rightly proud.

“They’re ecstatic. And it’s great to be able to give something back to them because they’ve always put me first. All their hard work has paid for my singing lessons... and that’s paid off.”

Dad, an ex-schoolboy boxer and court usher, is retired, and mum works with the NHS.

“She runs her own business in coaching and therapy and has really helped me with any performance anxieties I’ve had. She’s come backstage and got me in a really positive mindset before a concert.”

Anxieties? You’ve been singing publicly since school.

She adds: “And that was some of the best training I ever had. But if those butterflies ever go, I think you’re in the wrong profession.”

Amore’s debut album Stand Together will be released May 28. For more about them go to www.weareamore.com.