Opera Scotland

Jane Manning Suggest updates

Jane Manning OBE (1990).

Born Norwich, 20 September 1938.

Died, 31 March 2021.

English soprano.

Jane Manning had a uniquely impressive career as the performer of complex and vocally challenging new works by an enormous range of composers.  She sang at the BBC Proms and worked with many great conductors who specialised in modern scores, including Pierre Boulez.

She studied in London at the Royal Academy of Music, and after several years teaching attanded the Dartington Summer School in Devon, where she first encountered music by Webern.  She soon learned Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, .  The BBC broadcast her in it in 1965, and her many subsequent performances were widely regarded as definitive.  She recorded it with the Nash Ensemble and Simon Rattle.

Composers with whom she collaborated included Anthony Payne, her husband (The World's Winter); Richard Rodney Bennett;  Harrison Birtwistle (Nenia: The Death of Orpheus);  Peter Maxwell Davies (Miss Donnithorne's Maggot);  Judith Weir (King Harald's Saga);  Edward Harper (Fanny Robin);  Oliver Knussen (Where the Wild Things Are).

Her book on Pierrot Lunaire was highly praised (Voicing Pierrot 2012).

In Scotland, she appeared at several Edinburgh festivals.  With Edinburgh University she created (and recorded) the title role in Edward Harper's chamber opera Fanny Robin, (1975), and later repeated it in her only appearance with Scottish Opera (1978).  Appearances with the SNO included Erwartung (1990).

She later taught in London (at the Guildhall) and at Dartington.