Siân Dicker soprano won the 68th ROSL Annual Music Competition Singers Section Prize on Tuesday 18 February and was awarded £5,000 and a sought-after place at the Gold Medal Final on 1 June 2020. In an all-female line-up, Sian dazzled the audience and jury with her exceptional musicality and technique.
Five section finalists were chosen from 40 hopefuls during two rounds of preliminary auditions. This year saw an all-female line-up for the first time in many years, showing the depth of talent currently being produced. For the Section Final, sopranos Alexandra Flood, Siân Dicker, Isabelle Peters and Milly Forrest, and mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean battled it out for the £5,000 prize, which made for a very exciting evening of musicmaking. The adjudicators James Clutton, Gavin Henderson CBE, Patricia Macmahon, Geoff Parkin, Ann Rawdon Smith and Nicki Wenham had the difficult decision of choosing the section winner and performer who will go onto the Gold Medal Final to compete for the first prize of £15,000.
British soprano Siân Dicker is a scholarship student on the opera course at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama with Marie Vassiliou and Janice Chapman. She won the 2020 Oxford Lieder Young Artist Platform with duo partner Krystal Tunnicliffe and was recently awarded the runner up prize at the 2020 Clonter Opera Prize. Siân won the International Voice of the Future competition at the Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod in July 2017, and the Dunraven Welsh Young Singer of the Year competition in March 2017. She was awarded first prize at the Hurn Court Opera Singing Competition in July 2018 and was recently delighted to be awarded second prize at the 2019 Patricia Routledge English National Song competition.
Such was the talent on display that Lotte Betts-Dean was also awarded the £1,000 Audrey Strange Memorial Prize for a Singer of Promise.
ROSL Annual Music Competition Section Finals take place each Tuesday 7-9pm at Over-Seas House, Park Place, St James’s Street, London, SW1A 1LR:
- 11 February: Wind and Percussion – winner Sirius Chau flute
- 18 February: Singers – winner Siân Dicker soprano
- 25 February: Strings
- 3 March: Keyboard
- 10 March: Ensemble A (Strings)
- 17 March: Ensemble B (Mixed)
- 19 March: Overseas Award
- 1 June: Gold Medal Final which will be held at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London.
Tickets: £16. To book tickets, visit www.rosl.org.uk/events, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call 020 7408 0214 ext 219
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CONTACT AND IMAGES
For more information or press images contact Mark Brierley, Head of Communications on T:020 7016 6905 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. visit www.rosl.org.uk
NOTES FOR THE EDITOR
Founded in 1910, the Royal Over-Seas League (ROSL) is a non-profit private members' club dedicated to championing international friendship and understanding. ROSL helps artists and musicians across the Commonwealth connect, collaborate and create. Our humanitarian work benefits communities and changes lives.
ROSL supports talented young artists and musicians from the UK and Commonwealth, providing performance and exhibition opportunities which bring their work to the attention of the professional arts community, media and general public.
ROSL ANNUAL MUSIC COMPETITION
The ROSL Annual Music Competition grew out of a series of concerts inaugurated at Over-Seas House in 1947 under the banner ‘Festival of Commonwealth Youth’. The Festival became competitive in 1952, with a first prize of £10. Over the past 68 years the competition has grown in scope and prestige and now awards in excess of £80,000 for solo performers, accompanists and chamber ensembles. Past ROSL prizewinners makes for an impressive alumnus of musicians of the highest calibre who have established prominent careers in the music profession. Find a list of past winners here: https://www.rosl.org.uk/music/music-alumni . To mark ROSL’s centenary in 2010 an appeal was launched to secure the future endowment of the ROSL Annual Music Competition Awards and Commonwealth Music Scholarships, currently worth £125,000 per annum. The funds are held in the ROSL Trust (registered charity 306095). To make a donation contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.