Until recently Judith Engel received a lot of fan mail addressed to an actress of the same name known for her roles in Zadek and TV productions. In fact, the soprano Judith Engel is also a child of the theatre. Her mother was a dancer in Tom Schilling’s ballet troupe at Berlin’s Komische Oper. Even now she enjoys singing in Mahler’s Eighth Symphony or Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis more than anything else because of the sheer physical demands involved. This reminds her of the time when she watched the dancers during their rehearsals.
Originally, Engel wanted to become a puppeteer. For seven years she was associated with a puppet company. But when she applied for admission to Berlin’s Ernst Busch School, she was advised to undergo vocal training. In 1985 she entered the Hanns Eisler College of Music, graduating with a recital diploma seven years later. As it turned out, she was less interested in solo work than in the attempt to generate a sound collectively and to float on this sound. Precisely this is what she finds so exciting about her work with Simon Halsey and Simon Rattle who put all the singers of the Rundfunkchor to the test as soloists and yet manage to weld them together to form a homogeneous body.
Engel acted as a stand-in for the Rundfunkchor Berlin from 1993, becoming a permanent member in 1998. In the intervening period she spent two years singing in the choir of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Ultimately, the soprano opted for the Rundfunkchor because this allows her to concentrate entirely on the music and strive for ever higher standards of excellence in performing it.
Judith Engels’s taste may well be described as eclectic. She enjoyed singing under the direction of Claudio Abbado. Each time he walked across the Philharmonie there was a spiritual aura about him, she said full of admiration. Simon Rattle and Simon Halsey, on the other hand, were generating a sense of power, youthfulness and dynamism. She likens working with them to body-building, which she finds perfectly acceptable. But she also remembers with affection the Missa Solemnis under Sir Georg Solti in Salzburg, the Deutsches Requiem under Nikolaus Harnoncourt at the Philharmonie and the a cappella concert under Robin Gritton in Lewisburgh, held during a Rundfunkchor tour of the United States where she was to meet her husband-to-be, the singer Rainer Schnös. Judith Engel devotes her leisure time to her children, her dogs and her rock band, for which a Canadian woman friend provides the lyrics and her husband the music. And when you ask her about Christoph Schlingensief’s Parsifal production, which she recently saw in Bayreuth, she begins to wax lyrical. After all, the theatre is still her ruling passion.
Judith Engel is also a singer for the breathe band.
