Katherine Cooper read English at University College, Oxford, and completed a doctoral thesis on John Cowper Powys, taking private vocal training alongside her academic studies. Since making her opera debut in 2004 as Mrs Grose in The Turn of the Screw, she has established a reputation for 'compelling theatricality' (Opera Magazine) and a 'rich, plummy, distinguished mezzo’ (Opera Britannia). Rossini is central to her repertoire, with credits including his three great comic heroines Rosina, Angelina and Isabella, Pippo in La gazza ladra and all his major sacred works. Operatic engagements have also included the title-roles in Gluck’s Orfeo and Bizet's Carmen, Adalgisa (Norma), Frugola/La Zia Principessa/Zita (Il Trittico), Flosshilde (Das Rheingold), Miss Jessel (The Turn of the Screw) and Nancy (Albert Herring), plus the modern-day premieres of Hasse’s Il Siroe and Artaserse and Vinci’s Il Medo with Ensemble Serse. Recent engagements on the concert-platform include Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn (with Ian Bostridge and Oxford University Orchestra), Elgar's The Music-Makers and Dream of Gerontius, the Mozart, Verdi and Durufle Requiems, and Mendelssohn's Paulus and Elijah.
'Cooper shows immense promise (she might well turn to Wagner) as Adalgisa.'
[Cooper] conveys Adalgisa's sensuality through her smoky mezzo-soprano tones. We are left in no doubt as to why Pollione has become so smitten by her beauty and consequently leaves Norma for this dark woman from the forest of the druids...Her movements and gestures are full of conviction that one usually sees in a Shakespeare play.