Background
Palmer was born in Cheltenham.
music educator singer opera singer
Palmer was born in Cheltenham.
She studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and under Marianne Schech"s guidance at the Munich College for Music and Theatre.
She sang soprano roles until 1983. She made her operatic debut in 1971 as Dido in Dido and Aeneas with the Kent Opera. In 1973, she made her United States debut with the Houston Grand Opera and her Metropolitan Opera debut was in 2000 as Waltraute (Götterdämmerung).
Having made her debut with English National Opera (ENO) in 1975, her performance with the company forty years later, as the Countess in The Queen of Spades, was widely applauded and described as "mesmerising" and "astonishing".
Palmer has performed and recorded Gilbert and Sullivan operas, as Katisha in The Mikado for the ENO and the Welsh National Opera (WNO), Dame Carruthers in The Yeomen of the Guard (WNO) and Little Buttercup in His Majesty’s Ship Pinafore (WNO). In 1998, she played Widow Begbick in the Lyric Opera of Chicago production of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.
In 2003, she performed the role of Mrs Lovett in Stephen Sondheim"s Sweeney Todd at the Royal Opera House (the only musical the ROH has ever presented). She sang Venus in a 1983 British Broadcasting Corporation television broadcast of Orphée aux Enfers conducted by Alexander Faris.
She also sang the role in English with the ENO and recorded it as part of the Chandos "Opera in English" series.
Her other commercial recordings include The Flying Dutchman. Her work in contemporary music has included the first Glyndebourne production of Péter Eötvös"s opera Love and Other Demons, in the role of Josefa Miranda. Palmer is a professor at the Royal College of Music in London.
She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 1993 and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2011 New Year Honours for services to music