The delectable Welsh mezzo-soprano Katherine Jenkins has just published her autobiography, Time To Say Hello.

Most of the publicity for it centres on a harrowing passage describing how she narrowly escaped being raped by an attacker when she was 19 and studying at the Royal Academy of Music.

While we understand the need for a “killer fact” to sell the book, the prurience of the press in concentrating on this particular aspect of the singer’s life is a pity because it certainly has more to recommend it than that.

The rest of the biography is considerably more interesting for admirers of her voice and technique. Here’s a little taster :

I had arrived in London at the age of 18, having won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music.

The Academy was everything I had hoped for - in fact, it was fab-lous (my favourite word, pronounced Welsh-lilt style, as two words). I became great friends with my classmates and we were all determined to make the most of what London had to offer. […]

Some months after leaving the Academy, when I was working as a music teacher, I got a call out of the blue to say that a demo tape I had made at college had found its way into the hands of Universal Classics.

After being interviewed and singing for the team there, I was offered a record deal.

Soon after signing the contract in March 2003, news of what was described as my “million-pound record deal” was everywhere. […]

My first album, Premiere, shot straight to the top of the classical charts.

Even now, having recorded five albums and been lucky enough to meet and work with so many of my musical heroes and performing all over the world, it still seems like a fairy tale.

Time To Say Hello by Katherine Jenkins is published by Orion on January 28 at £18.99 in the UK.

In the UK, ITV recently broadcast a series called Britain’s got Talent. The series was nothing special, but it did throw up an unusual winner for such shows : an amateur opera singer.

Paul Potts, age 36, a mobile phone salesman from Port Talbot in South Wales (where else for an opera singer?), inevitably clinched his victory with a spirited performance of Puccini’s Nessun Dorma.

But how good is he? That’s not so easy to judge.

As is normal for such shows, the audience was encouraged to applaude every high note and familiar phrase. The judging panel comprised the usual suspects of light-entertainment producers, a former tabloid editor and an actress. The singer was also helped by amplification in the studio, so the strength of his voice was not tested. It’s possible that at Covent Garden or La Scala, he wouldn’t be heard at the back of the auditorium.

His voice reminded me of a young Harry Seccombe, a much-loved Welsh comedian who sang a bit of the heavy stuff.

Not surprisingly, Paul Potts first sang opera at the age of 28 for a karaoke competition where he dressed up as Pavarotti.

ITV says, “He went on to perform in Barrymore’s My Kind Of Music (1999). The money he won from the show (£8000) along with his savings was spent on attending various training courses in Italy. From his Italian opera class he was selected to sing in a master class for Pavarotti and Katia Ricciarelli – who he says were very impressed. Paul reckons he’s spent £20,000 in total to get to where he is today.”

Paul has performed in four semi professional operas in the UK and some concerts. His proudest performance was with the Philharmonic Orchestra in a concert in front of 15,000 people.

A motorcycle accident is reckoned to have held him back from reaching his full potential.

Frank Bridge (1879-1941) is not much heard of nowadays. He was born in Brighton of a working-class family and studied at the Royal College of Music in London from 1899 to 1903 under Charles Villiers Stanford and others.

Despite his “revolutionary” ideas, his composing career never took off. He later found success as a conductor.

Bridge’s pacifism didn’t go down well in World War I and his greatest solace came from the landscapes of the South Downs in Sussex. His biographer, Rob Barnett said, “Such was the spell cast by … the Downs and the seascape, that he was moved to write a musical nature poem, Enter Spring, which was his masterpiece.

Frank Bridge played the viola in a number of string quartets, most notably the English String Quartet, and conducted, sometimes deputising for Henry Wood, before devoting himself to composition, receiving the patronage of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. He privately tutored a number of pupils, most famously Benjamin Britten, who later championed his teacher’s music and paid homage to him in the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937), based on a theme from the second of Bridge’s Three Idylls for String Quartet (1906). Bridge died in Eastbourne.

Among Bridge’s works are the orchestral The Sea (1911), Oration (1930) for cello and orchestra and the opera The Christmas Rose (premiered 1932), but he is perhaps most highly regarded today for his chamber music. His early works are in a late-Romantic idiom, but later pieces such as the third (1926) and fourth (1937) string quartets are harmonically advanced and very distinctive, showing the influence of the Second Viennese School.

Of all operatic arias, the one that truly escaped the clutches of the aficionado, and became a popular favourite, was Puccini’s dramatic song from Turandot, Nessun Dorma.

Although it has remained a classic of “easy listening” radio, it achieved pop status by being the theme for the 1990 World Cup in Italy, when it was memorably sung by Luciano Pavarotti, still in his pomp. It has also appeared in modern films, like Toys, The Witches of Eastwick, and an array of others.

The aria translates as, “And None Shall Sleep”. It was part of Giancomo Puccini’s last opera, Turandot, which remained unfinished. It was premiered in 1926 at La Scala, Milan.

Puccini nearly died in a car crash in 1904 as a result of his passion for fast cars. He had already completed the works by which he is best known : La Boheme, Tosca and Madame Butterfly.

Nessun Dorma is from the final act of Turandot. Other parts were in sketch form only and were completed by composer, Franco Alfano.

Puccini was fighting throat cancer, caused by heavy cigar smoking, while writing Turandot. Despite the use of radiotherapy — then a new technique — Puccini died of a heart attack from complications on November 29, 1924.

His work lives on, however, and Nessun Dorma is being played somewhere on the world’s radio stations round the clock.

Adapted from information given in Weekend Magazine.