[3] She studied with Helene Isepp,[3] and retrained as a soprano with Frederick Husler and Yvonne Rodd-Marling,[7] the authors of Singing: The Physical Nature of the Vocal Organ.
[7] She appeared at the ROH in 1975 as Ellen Orford in Britten's Peter Grimes in a new production staged by Elijah Moshinsky, alongside Jon Vickers in the title role.
She appeared as a regular guest at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, including roles such as Marguerite in Gounod's Faust and Vitellia in Mozart's La clemenza di Tito.
[3] She sang in the premiere of Britten's War Requiem at Coventry Cathedral with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Peter Pears in 1962, substituting for Galina Vishnevskaya at ten days' notice.
At the Belfast Last Night of the Proms in 1985, she gave the world premiere of Malcolm Williamson's song cycle Next Year in Jerusalem to international critical acclaim.
Her final performance was at the BBC Proms, singing Alban Berg's Altenberg Lieder and Ralph Vaughan Williams's Serenade to Music.
Some 1970s recordings, conducted by Sir Georg Solti, were reissued, notably Mahler's Eighth Symphony with Lucia Popp, Arleen Augér, Yvonne Minton, Helen Watts, René Kollo, John Shirley-Quirk and Martti Talvela; and Die Frau ohne Schatten by Richard Strauss with Helga Dernesch, Ruth Hesse, James King and Walter Berry (Covent Garden, 1976, Fiori).
I heard her sing it in St Paul's not long ago and thought then that her peculiar accents, her inevitable shaping of so much of the part simply had to be preserved for posterity.
Her perceptions are superior to those of both Haywood (Shaw) and Söderström (Rattle) by virtue of her longer association with the piece, and her tone shows very few signs of the advancing years.
Of course, Vishnevskaya's hieratical utterance (Decca) is something unique and inimitable, but for a comprehensive understanding of what Britten wanted, Harper is hard to equal.