Victoria and Albert

Opera careers are all about big breaks, and this month mezzosoprano Victoria Simmonds will get hers. When her agent rang to ask if she'd step into the title role in Raymond Gubbay's Royal Albert Hall Carmen after a star had become pregnant it was the call, she says, she'd long dreamed of. Simmonds may be in her midthirties, but seems much younger: for this role traditionally the mature mezzo's Everest she agrees she has prejudice to overcome.

'I may not be everyone's ideal casting,' she says, 'but there's no reason why you can't have a Carmen who both looks and sounds young.

After all, the character is supposed to be young. And those dark voices of older singers are not always nice to listen to.' As Coliseum regulars will attest, her voice with its lovely evenness from top to bottom is exceptionally nice to listen to, but one doesn't think of her primarily in terms of sound: she's essentially a stage presence, with a remarkable capacity to mutate to suit the moment. She's been an irresistible Pitti-Sing in The Mikado, a sexually voracious Zerlina in Don Giovanni and an entrancing Rosina in The Barber Of Seville. She makes a convincingly gauche Cherubino, and, as Ascanius in Berlioz's The Trojans, she transforms herself into something creepily butch. How does she do these things? 'By studying teenage boys, how they move it's all in the hips, and in their bigger strides.

Basically I just get into boy mode.' But since she finds such instinctive matters hard to articulate, I settle instead for an account of where she came from.

Her Staffordshire origins are audible in her voice and brisk, blunt manner, and it's no surprise to find that her first ambition was to be an actress. As a vicar's daughter, it was natural for her to sing in church, where, even at 11, she had an alto timbre. She took lessons and starred in shows for village halls 'I began to have ambitions, but had no idea how I was going to realise them.' The answer was a fouryear course at the London College Of Music, followed by three years knocking about on the fringes of music theatre with a group she led, whose prize show was a home-made confection entitled Mm, Your Lavatory Smells Fresh! She also sang in a Christmas show for a Norfolk steam-engine museum and the live doves with whom she recently shared the stage in the English National Opera's Magic Flute were the very same ones she shared the stage with when she performed in Norfolk.

She studied for two more years at the Guildhall, picking up big prizes, and then, through a series of happy accidents less happy for the singers whose illnesses she was called in to cover for she made her progress via Glyndebourne ('getting shagged in a lift in an opera set at Heathrow') to the training scheme for ENO. And there she was catapulted into stage comradeship with Tom Allen and his ilk, which is how she learned her craft. Workshops with the actress Fiona Shaw were also part of this training, one of whose exercises Simmonds still puts into practice with her friends: vocalising the essence of a painting by Klimt or Matisse, for a blindfolded colleague to describe. 'It's a great way to see how much you can communicate without words. It gets creative muscles going which you don't often use.' In her spare time she gives recitals often charity ones for her father's church but she also has further aspirations. 'My burning ambition is to sing Maria in West Side Story and I'd love to do My Fair Lady.' Could she manage the different styles? 'If I'm in the car and I've got the Sugababes on, I don't sing along in an operatic way. There's nothing I hate more than a musical which has been recorded by opera singers in an operatic style. If you're going to be a crossover artist, you've got to really cross over.' She's currently being pestered to make a jazz record, 'but I'm only going to do it if I feel I can do it properly'.

For the time being, she's off contract with ENO, because her year is busy enough: after Carmen she's singing in Amsterdam, then in Garsington, and after a Prom, she'll be in Holland Park, after which she's marrying an electronics engineer, then taking a break to mark that crossroad in her life.

'But it's not good to work absolutely all the time occasionally you have to rest your voice.' And Carmen will indeed be hard work. 'In the Albert Hall you're watched from all sides, so you can't let your guard drop for a second, as you can in a theatre with a proscenium arch. It's total concentration all the time.' When I ask if there's any competitiveness between her and Imelda Drumm, with whom she's sharing the lead Drumm has done this show before, but Simmonds is getting the first night the answer is an emphatic no.

'There are times when Imelda helps me out I have to be tied up with rope at one point, and it was taking me hours to work out how, until she showed me.

At one point we have to break plates in sync with the music, and she's much better than I am at that, so I downplay it. But I try not to watch her, otherwise you find yourself doing things not because you believe they're right for you, but because you feel they are correct. You have to find your own way.' But what is Carmen French 'opera comique', or Italian 'verismo'?

Simmonds has no doubts: 'It's a full-on serious story, full of real emotion.

People may not often kill each other, but they can do terrible things when they're in a jealous rage. Though I haven't much in common with Carmen, it's been easy to find something in my life which relates to it. Being cruel to be kind, saying, "No I don't love you". There are resonances you can call on.

And anyway, you get swept along by the music.' As we doubtless all will.

Victoria Simmonds stars in Carmen from Thur 17 Feb, Royal Albert Hall, Kensington Gore, SW7 (020-7589 8212).

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