Lotte Betts-Dean mezzo-soprano
(except tracks 2, 10, 19)
Dimitris Soukaras guitar
Baden Powell (1937–2000)
lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes (1913–1980)
Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)
arr. Dimitris Soukaras
Mátyás Seiber (1905–1960)
Canto de Ossanha [4:45]
À la manière de Borodine [1:43]
Réveillez-vous from Four French Folk Songs [2:31]
Manuel de Falla (1876–1946) Asturiana Nana
Canción
from Siete canciones populares españolas (arr. for voice and guitar by Miguel Llobet, rev. Emilio Pujol) [2:28] [1:28] [1:07]
Vicente Asencio (1908–1979) La Calma from Collectici íntim [2:43]
Claude Debussy (1862–1918)
arr. Tilman Hoppstock L’âme évaporée from Two Romances [2:04]
Sinéad O’Connor (1966–2023)
arr. Dimitris Soukaras Jackie
Maurice Ravel arr. Dimitris Soukaras Chanson de la mariée
Chanson des cueilleuses de lentisques from Cinq mélodies populaires grecques
Caroline Polachek (b.1985) arr. Dimitris Soukaras Go as a Dream
Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) arr. Julian Bream The Second Lute Song of the Earl of Essex from Gloriana [4:46]
ık Veysel (1894–1973) /
Carlo Domeniconi (b. 1947) arr. Dimitris Soukaras Uzun ince bir yoldayım
Jorge Cardoso (b.1949) Milonga from 24 Piezas Sudamericanas [2:27]
Paurillo Barroso (1894–1968) arr. Laurindo Almeida Para ninar [2:50]
Armando Soares (1920–2007) arr. Dimitris Soukaras Sodade [4:25] Total playing time [61:21]
Richard Rodgers (1902–1979)
arr. Dimitris Soukaras lyrics by Lorenz Hart (1895–1943)
Burt Bacharach (1928–2023)
arr. James Girling lyrics by Hal David (1921–2012)
My Brightest Diamond (Shara Nova, b.1974)
arr. Dimitris Soukaras
Blue Moon [2:27]
A House Is Not a Home [4:59]
Have You Ever Seen an Angel [3:27]
Recorded on 2-3 December 2024 at Crichton Collegiate Church, Edinburgh
Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter
24-bit digital editing: Jack Davis
24-bit digital mixing & mastering: Paul Baxter Paintings by Heather Betts: cover – ‘Overthrown’, 2017 (detail, reworked); booklet rear – ‘He lets me go’, 2015 (detail); digipack interior,
left – ‘Counterpoint’, 2018; right, under CD tray – ‘The Pleasure’, 2018 (detail)
Cover photograph © Nikolai Matiushev
Session photography: foxbrushfilms.com
Design: Eliot Garcia
Booklet editor: John Fallas
Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.com
@ delphianrecords
@delphianrecords.com @ delphian_records
Something about dreaming: notes on everything you’ve ever lived
There is a series of questions in Sarah Arvio’s poem, ‘Flying’, that I think of often. ‘Did you leave a life?’ she asks. ‘Did you leave a love? / Are you out here looking for another?’ We are constantly between two states: waking and sleeping, living and dying, staying and leaving. The in-between spaces in which we find ourselves are sometimes the most troubling, challenging, confounding; but they can also offer the space for the most creative stimulation, allowing us the freedom to unpick and re-embroider the parts of ourselves that otherwise lie in shadow.
across the course of their individual careers and lives.
Lotte Betts-Dean, a singer who dwells in the space between genres, between expectations, between definitions, has a recurring dream about people from her childhood, people she’s left behind: lives she’s lived, lives she’s living, lives she may live again. The people do not recur, she says, but the situations do. ‘I feel like I’m subconsciously connected to my childhood experience in some way; the recurring pattern makes me feel like I can revisit my own early life.’ It is this subconscious space that became the canvas for everything you’ve ever lived, created alongside the guitarist Dimitris Soukaras. The two musicians, who have worked together already for several seasons, connected over their expansive repertoire interests, as well as the family ties that have helped shape their musical fascinations
Dimitris, born like Lotte into a musical family, has ‘visited dreams again and again. Usually they involve people who are no longer with me – my grandparents, for example.’ The dreams throw him back in time, too: ‘There I am a child, but there’s a feeling of eternity, as if I’m in a loop.’ He’s not in control, but he feels safe, as Lotte does, dwelling in that place that is neither here nor there, but somehow represents everywhere. It is a nice feeling to swim there, he tells me, in the ‘blurry memory’ – you take from it ‘not the exact picture, but the feeling’, which is, for both artists, where this album dwells. That mélange of ambiguity and subconscious understanding sits alongside Lotte and Dimitris’s interest in harmonic connection and the subtle stories that can be told through that method alone, and the two concepts began to act as twin narrative threads to connect the broad and ambitious musical worlds this project aimed to capture.
Conceptually, though, everything you’ve ever lived didn’t arrive fully formed for the two musicians. ‘We didn’t have a clear set idea from the get-go,’ Lotte says. ‘It wasn’t a concept initially: that came later. We were gatherers – no judgment, no plan – and in doing that, in pulling together the threads we
wanted to include we realised the common theme. And that opened the door to more specific searching! [The whole process] has made me listen to music in a different way.’ There is a touch of the playlist about how the record sits on paper, beginning with a nod to samba before skirting through art song, folk music, and pop. But what links it all is that feeling that Dimitris described, of somewhere between reality and unreality, wakefulness and dreaming.
Baden Powell’s Canto de Ossanha opens the record, a part of the Brazilian bossa nova movement, featuring both classical and jazz guitar techniques, and inspired by Ossanha, a deity of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé. The god is associated with healing and magic, so we are immediately thrust into an otherworldly place, both musically and esoterically. We then swiftly tour the world, from Georgia and Russia seen through a French lens in Ravel’s homage À la manière de Borodine, through a Hungarian- and English-inflected France with Mátyás Seiber’s arrangement of the French folk song Réveillez-vous, to Spanish folk songs arranged by Manuel de Falla. These songs all dwell in dreaming, and in liminal space; in borrowing and gathering and reimagining, just as the record they sit on does.
In the following bracket, three songs in English from very different styles with a strong through-line of nostalgia, beginning with Rodgers and Hart’s Blue Moon. Now a standard of the ballad repertoire, the song forms an early memory for Lotte, whose mother hummed it to her as a lullaby in childhood. We stay with yearning in Burt Bacharach’s A House Is Not a Home, and Shara Nova’s Have You Ever Seen an Angel. ‘Oh angel hold my hand / angel sit with me / while I weep & sigh / oh my what a life / oh my what a life.’ The song, released under Nova’s stage name, My Brightest Diamond, on the 2024 album Fight the Real Terror, grapples with ‘some of the worst moments in my life … and how at key moments I felt connected to something bigger than myself, as though I was being helped, or a feeling of not being alone even when I was alone’. There is a lullaby-like quality to the subtle melody –the intimacy of someone singing another to sleep, whether really there or not.
From his collection of ‘Intimate Pieces’ (Collectici íntim), Vicente Asencio’s La Calma allows us to stay in a dreamlike state, moving effortlessly from one memory to another – in Nova’s case, one draped in grief, and here in Asencio’s, a sense of calm following a storm. The melodies continue to shift and swirl in Debussy’s L’âme évaporée, an early work of the composer’s written as he transitioned into
impressionism. If we were French we might make a play on words here: ‘l’âme’ is the soul, but ‘lame’, pronounced the same way, means ‘blade’, a word that could be used to describe the songwriting of Sinéad O’Connor, and in particular Jackie, the haunting first cut from her 1987 debut album The Lion and the Cobra. It may not sound like your regular lullaby; the blade here has been sharpened, but the story – at once as mythic and as real as any heartbreak – has a lulling streak. Buoyed now by Sinéad’s cutting storytelling, we return to Ravel and Debussy, with two of the former’s set of five songs based on traditional Greek melodies and texts here restored to their original language, and the latter creating in Les Angélus a heartbreaking prayer within a prayer.
‘Someone changed the clock and left the window open / When I must have drifted off,’ begins Caroline Polachek’s Go as a Dream (from her 2019 album Pang), which could almost be a continuation of Debussy. ‘There’s an experience of a constant now in dreams,’ Dimitris proposes, perhaps in recognition of the limitless pool of inspiration this state has offered and continues to offer artists. ‘It’s kind of like performing: you don’t experience time moving, there is a weightlessness there. You just experience the now, not the past or the future. You’re not thinking ahead or behind, you’re just thinking about the moment. And
that’s the same with sleeping – it’s eternal, there is no sense of time.’ That, to Dimitris, is mysterious but sweet, the knowledge of the gap in time, that we are – for a few hours hopefully, every night – allowed to disappear from ourselves. The Second Lute Song of the Earl of Essex exists as a self-contained interlude in Benjamin Britten’s opera Gloriana, an exploration of the relationships in the court of Queen Elizabeth I written for the coronation of her successor and namesake, Elizabeth II. The Earl of Essex, whose story does not end happily, was yet happy ‘in some unhaunted desert’ – content in knowing he ‘might sleep secure, then wake again’. Perhaps, for all of us, that offers some type of comfort.
Comfort, musically at least, is where the record ends, in a final sequence that begins with Uzun ince bir yoldayım – a song by the Turkish folk singer (or ‘bard’) Âşık Veysel, arranged initially by Carlo Domeniconi for guitar in 1983 and re-transcribed and adapted by the performers for this recording, that expresses a journey both literal and metaphorical. The journey moves through South American musical traditions in Jorge Cardoso’s Milonga, from his 24 Piezas Sudamericanas, composed in 1980, then hurtles back – as this whole album has done, hurtling us, the listeners, backwards and forwards without nary a feeling of whiplash –
to 1937 with Paurillo Barroso’s setting of the lullaby Para ninar, arranged by the legendary Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almeida. For all our travels, we have been kept suspended in air: in our own nostalgia, in each other’s, in the artists’. We are allowed, just for the moment that the needle is down, to remember our own pasts, our own favourite melodies, in all their complications. We are given permission, as sleep gives us permission, to disappear in some way.
We close with Armando Soares’ Sodade, another song with childhood resonance for both musicians. A Cape Verdean song made world-famous by Cesária Évora, and whose authorship was for a long time uncertain or disputed until it was definitively credited to Armando Zeferino Soares in 2006, Sodade reflects longing and homesickness, but its resonance is larger than that: it somehow – defying time, defying language – encapsulates the entirety of the feeling of being between two places, and feeling nostalgic, both happily and sadly. We do miss our hometowns, and we do miss our futures, without knowing where they might be. These feelings, ultimately, are intensely human: we take and give, we teach and we learn, we are happy and sad at the same time. We live ‘in a big circular tradition of handing songs on to one another – from parent to child, from teacher to student, from
artist to artist. It’s an ancient tradition,’ says Lotte, ‘the way we share ideas and music and feeling with one another.’ And there are those feelings that we don’t need to teach, or even to explain, but that get passed on anyway.
And you know the feeling, we all know the feeling: of falling asleep and as you begin to drift off, feeling connected to everything you’ve ever lived, everything you ever will live – the past and its stitched feelings of nostalgia, and the openness or fear or anticipation of your whole future. In that moment before you hit deep sleep, there is, Lotte muses, almost ‘a timelessness to our existence, and the fact that we come and we go, making things along the way. You’re there floating in all the meaning and lack of meaning, finally truly open.’ We laugh about this, the vastness of it all; but there’s a gravity to the idea too, and a real sense that music –that abstract and beautiful and unknowable art form – can bridge some kind of gap between two mercurial spaces.
For Lotte and Dimitris, ultimately, this album is a reflection on family. About the songs their parents sang and played for them – a way of saying thank you for the music. Lotte’s dad comes in towards the end of our conversation to offer tea. It’s a special final note for this chat, a nod to the music that has been passed on, and to the music that is being passed
Something about dreaming Acknowledgments
back. ‘I want my nephew to listen to these songs,’ Lotte says. ‘Maybe one day they’ll put him to sleep when I can’t be there.’
© 2025 Megan Steller
Megan Steller is a writer and artist manager from Melbourne, Australia.
Lotte and Dimitris wish to thank John Fletcher, Heather Betts, Shara Nova, Caroline Polachek and Tap Management, John Reynolds, Megan Steller, James Girling, Nikolai Matiushev, our dear supporters and funders in Greece who wish to remain anonymous, Crichton Collegiate Church, our families – Konstantina, Nikos, Zeta, Thanos, Heather, Brett, Kiki, Dan and Hugo – and of course the wonderful and ever-patient and encouraging Will, Paul, John and Jessica at Delphian.
Canto de Ossanha
O homem que diz “Dou” não dá
Porque quem dá mesmo não diz
O homem que diz “Vou” não vai
Porque quando foi já não quis
O homem que diz “Sou” não é
Porque quem é mesmo é “não sou”
O homem que diz “Tou” não tá
Porque ninguém tá quando quer
Coitado do homem que cai
No canto de Ossanha, traidor
Coitado do homem que vai
Atrás de mandinga de amor
Vai, vai, vai (não vou)
Vai, vai, vai (não vou)
Vai, vai, vai (não vou)
Vai, vai, vai
Não vou, que eu não sou ninguém de ir
Em conversa de esquecer
A tristeza de um amor que passou
Não, eu só vou se for pra ver
Uma estrela aparecer
Na manhã de um novo amor
The man who says ‘I’ll give’ won’t give
Because those who really give don’t say
The man who says ‘I’m going’ won’t go
Because when he went, he wished he hadn’t
The man who says ‘I am’ is not
Because those who truly are say they aren’t
The man who says ‘I’m here’ is not
Because no one’s where they want to be
Poor man who’s trapped
In the treacherous song of Ossanha
Poor man who seeks
Love spells
Go, go, go! (I won’t go) …
Amigo sinhô, saravá!
Xangô me mandou lhe dizer
Se é canto de Ossanha, não vá
Que muito vai se arrepender
Pergunte pro seu orixá
O amor só é bom se doer
Amar, sofrer
Chorar, dizer
Vai, vai …
Dizer que eu não sou ninguém de ir
Em conversa de esquecer
A tristeza de um amor que passou
Não, eu só vou se for pra ver
Uma estrela aparecer
Na manhã de um novo amor
Vinicius de Moraes (1913–1980)
I won’t go, for I’m not the sort to fall for talk
About forgetting the sadness
Of a love that has ended
No, I’ll only go if it’s to see
A star be born
In the dawn of a new love
Friend, sir, greetings!
Xangô sent me to tell you
If it’s Ossanha’s song, don’t go
You’ll regret it bitterly
Ask your ‘orixá’
Love is only good if it hurts
Love, suffer
Cry, say
Go, go, go ...
And say that I’m not the sort to fall for talk
About forgetting the sadness
Of a love that’s come to an end
No, I’ll only go if it’s to see
A star be born
In the dawn of a new love
Réveillez-vous
Réveillez-vous, belle endormie, Réveillez-vous, car il est jour.
Mettez la tête à la fenêtre, Vous entendrez parler de vous.
La belle a mis le pied à terre, Tout doucement s’en est allée, D’une main elle ouvrit la porte : « Entrez, galant, si vous m’aimez. »
Mais la belle s’est endormie
Entre les bras de son amant Et celui-ci qui la regarde, En lui voyant ces yeux mourants.
Que les étoiles sont brillantes
Et le soleil est éclatant, Mais les beaux yeux de ma maîtresse En sont encore les plus charmants.
Traditional French
Por ver si me consolaba, arriméme a un pino verde, por ver si me consolaba,
Por verme llorar, lloraba.
Y el pino como era verde, por verme llorar, lloraba!
Awake, O sleeping beauty!
Wake up, for it is day!
Lean out of the window, You will hear people talking about you.
The beautiful girl set out on her way; Gently she went.
With one hand she opened the door: ‘Come in, O gallant one, if you love me!’
But the beautiful girl has fallen asleep
In the arms of her lover, Who looks at her With longing eyes.
How bright are the stars, And how brilliant the sun, But my mistress’s beautiful eyes Are even more bewitching.
To see if it would console me, I drew close to a green pine tree –to see if it would console me.
Seeing me weep, it wept.
And the pine tree, being green, wept to see me weeping!
Nana
Duérmete, niño, duerme, duerme, mi alma, duérmete, lucerito de la mañana. Nanita, nana, nanita, nana. Duérmete, lucerito de la mañana.
Sleep, little one, go to sleep, sleep, my darling; go to sleep, my little morning star. Lulla-lullay, lulla-lullay. Sleep, my little morning star.
Canción
Por traidores, tus ojos, voy a enterrarlos. No sabes lo que cuesta, «del aire» niña, el mirarlos. «Madre, a la orilla».
Dicen que no me quieres, ya me has querido. Váyase lo ganado «del aire» por lo perdido.
«Madre, a la orilla».
Traditional Spanish
Since your eyes are treacherous, I am going to bury them. You don’t know what it costs, (… out of the air …) little girl, to gaze into them. (Mother, at the edge.)
They say you do not love me. But you loved me once. Easy come, (… out of the air …) easy go.
(Mother, on the shore.)
Asturiana
A House Is Not a Home
The texts for tracks 7 and 8 are omitted for reasons of copyright.
Have You Ever Seen an Angel
Have you ever seen an angel
On a December night when the light of hope is all burned out
Have you ever seen an angel
In January May or June
Did your horizon go tilted forever to stay askew
Oh angel hold my hand
Angel sit with me
While I weep and sigh
Oh my, what a life
Oh my, what a life
Have you ever seen an angel
In a desperate hour when nobody’s pickin’ up the line
Have you ever seen an angel
After the house is clean
And your spirit’s quiet and listening for angels
Oh my, what a life
Oh my, what a life
Oh, glory
Gloria …
Shara Nova (b. 1974)
Romance (L’âme évaporée)
L’âme évaporée et souffrante, L’âme douce, l’âme odorante
Des lys divins que j’ai cueillis
Dans le jardin de ta pensée,
Où donc les vents l’ont-ils chassée, Cette âme adorable des lys ?
N’est-il plus un parfum qui reste
De la suavité céleste
Des jours où tu m’enveloppais
D’une vapeur surnaturelle, Faite d’espoir, d’amour fidèle, De béatitude et de paix ?
Paul Bourget (1852–1935)
The spent and suffering soul, The sweet soul, the soul scented By the divine lilies which I picked In the garden of your thoughts –
Where have the winds dispersed it, This precious lilies’ soul?
Does no scent remain at all
Of heavenly softness
From the days when you enveloped me
In a supernatural haze, Made of hope, of faithful love, Of bliss and of peace?
Jackie
Jackie left on a cold, dark night
Telling me he’d be home
Sailed the seas for a hundred years
Leaving me all alone
And I’ve been dead for twenty years
I’ve been washing the sand
With my ghostly tears
Searching the shores for my Jackie-oh
I remember the day the young man came
He said, ‘Your Jackie’s gone
We got lost in the rain’
And I ran to the beach
And laid me down
‘You’re all wrong,’ I said And they stared at the sand
‘That man knows that sea
Like the back of his hand
He’ll be back some time
Laughing at you’
And I’ve been waiting all this time
For my man to come
Take his hand in mine
And lead me away
To unseen shores
I’ve been washing the sand
With my salty tears
Searching the shore
For these long years
And I’ll walk the seas for evermore
Till I find my Jackie-oh
Sinéad O’Connor (1966–2023)
Wake up, wake up, partridge, flap your wings.
Three beauty spots, and a fourth one painted on; you’ve set my heart on fire.
I brought you a golden ribbon to braid your hair. Come, let us be a couple, and our parents become in-laws.
Chanson des cueilleuses de lentisques*
Oh, you are an angel, my eyes! Oh, you dance like an angel! You tread on the earth like an angel, and alas! all the young girls wither.
Les Angélus
Cloches chrétiennes pour les matines, Sonnant au cœur d’espérer encore !
Angélus angélisés d’aurore ! Las! Où sont vos prières câlines?
Vous étiez de si douces folies ! Et chanterelles d’amours prochaines ! Aujourd’hui souveraine est ma peine Et toutes matines abolies.
Je ne vis plus que d’ombre et de soir ; Les las angélus pleurent la mort, Et là, dans mon coeur résigné, dort La seule veuve de tout espoir.
Grégoire Le Roy (1862–1941)
Christian bells ring out for matins, Telling the heart to go on hoping. Angelus bells made angelic by the dawn –Alas, where are your soothing prayers? You were such sweet madness! Harbingers of future loves!
Today my sorrow reigns supreme And all matin bells have been abolished.
My whole life now is but shadow and evening; The weary angelus bewails death, And there, in my resigned heart, sleeps The only widow of any hope.
* The title given by M.-D. Calvocoressi (in whose French translations Ravel originally set these texts) means ‘Song of the Mastic Collectors’. Mastic gum is a resin obtained from a shrub that is native to the island of Chios.
Chanson de la mariée
Go as a Dream
Someone changed the clock
And left the window open
When I must have drifted off
And it’s just your kind of trick
To leave me empty-handed
Leave me with a riddle unsolved
I don’t know if I can do this
I don’t know if I can make this peace
And you’re almost like that card
Played by the magician
But this time you’re not coming back
And it’s slipping through my fists
Blurry at the edges
Leaving only legend
You go as a dream
Go as a dream
I don’t know if I can do this
I don’t know if I can make this peace
And it hit me like a brick
A joke without a punchline
A script that nobody read
If you saw me lying here
Through my bedroom ceiling
You would have me pick up my head and
Go as a dream
Go as a dream
Caroline Polachek (b. 1985)
The Second Lute Song of the Earl of Essex
Happy were he could finish forth his fate
In some unhaunted desert where, obscure From all society, from love and hate
Of worldly folk, then might he sleep secure; Then wake again, and give God ever praise, Content with hips and haws and bramble-berry; In contemplation spending all his days, And change of holy thoughts to make him merry: Where, when he dies, his tomb might be a bush Where harmless robin dwells with gentle thrush. – Happy were he!
Uzun ince bir yoldayım
Uzun ince bir yoldayım
Gidiyorum gündüz gece
Bilmiyorum ne haldeyim
Gidiyorum gündüz gece
Dünyaya geldiğim anda Yürüdüm aynı zamanda İki kapılı bir handa
Gidiyorum gündüz gece
I’m on a long and narrow road
I walk all day, I walk all night
I don’t know what state I’m in I walk all day, I walk all night
As soon as I came into the world
I found myself having to walk
In an inn with two doors*
Walking all day, walking all night
* The two doors represent birth and death. The emphasis is on the hardship of life from beginning to end.
Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex (1565–1601)
(1894–1973)
Para ninar
Foge, foge, papão feio
Que o menino é muito meu
Vai a noite em mais de meio
Ainda não adormeceu.
Meu menino pende o rosto
Reza baixinho e de cor.
São trindades, é sol posto, Dorme, dorme, meu amor!
Deus por certo se enganou
Quando o meu filho nasceu.
Porque um anjo me mandou
E os anjos são do céu.
Meu menino, meu menino, Altas horas a dormir.
Em que sonhas pequenino
Quando te vejo a sorrir?
Traditional Brazilian
Begone, begone, ugly bogeyman*
I’ll have you know this boy’s all mine
More than half the night’s already passed
And he’s yet to fall asleep.
Lay down your head, my child
Pray quietly, and from your heart.
The angelus calls, the sun is set, Go to sleep, go to sleep, my love!
God surely must have made some error
When my little son was born.
Because he sent me down an angel And angels are meant to live in heaven.
My boy, my boy,
Now sleeping in the wee hours of the night.
What is it you’re dreaming of, little one, When I see you break a smile?
Translation © Thomas Dervan
* In the popular folklore of the Lusophone world, the ‘papão’ or ‘bicho-papão’ is an imaginary being that can take on the form of any beast or creature. It is often portrayed as a monstrous animal with a penchant for eating children. In Brazil and Portugal, stories about the ‘bicho-papão’ are used by parents to scare children into behaving well.
Sodade
Ken mostrá-be es kaminhu lonje?
Es kaminhu pa Santumé
Sodade, sodade
Sodade des nha térra Saniklau
Si bo skrevê-m, n ta skrevê-be
Si bo skesê-m, n ta skesê-be
Ate dia ki bo voltá
Sodade, sodade
Sodade des nha térra Saniklau
Armando Soares (1920–2007)
Who showed you this distant path?
This path to São Tomé
Longing, longing
Longing for this land of mine, São Nicolau
If you write to me, I’ll write to you
If you forget me, I’ll forget you ’Til the day you come back
Longing, longing
Longing for this land of mine, São Nicolau
Translations: Delphian Records except where stated
Biographies
Described by The Guardian as ‘a singer of rich and fearless versatility’, Australian mezzosoprano Lotte Betts-Dean is passionate about curation and programming, with a broad repertoire that encompasses contemporary, chamber and early music, as well as art song, opera, oratorio and non-classical collaborations. Lotte has premiered numerous works and recorded several composer portrait albums, including acclaimed releases of Stuart MacRae and Arthur Keegan for Delphian Records, as well as albums celebrating Michael Finnissy (Divine Art / Métier) and Catherine Lamb (Another Timbre). She has also recorded for BIS (Brett Dean), Ensemble Q (Berio), Naxos (Philippos Tsalahouris) and Salmon Universe (Luke Abbott), with forthcoming albums due on Farpoint Records, Platoon, Hänssler Classic and Delphian.
Operatic engagements include Bayerische Staatsoper (Weinberg Die Passagierin), Grand Théâtre de Genève (Matthew Shlomowitz Electric Dreams), Aldeburgh Festival (Colin Matthews A Visit To Friends), State Opera of South Australia (Brett Dean Hamlet) and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (Stravinsky Perséphone), and she is a regular at festivals across the UK, Europe and Australia, including Oxford Song, St Magnus Festival, West Cork Chamber Music, Purbeck Chamber Music and Australian Festival of Chamber Music, as well as venues such as Wigmore Hall and Kings Place, London. Lotte has collaborated
with chamber groups and artists including Explore Ensemble, London Sinfonietta, Ficino Ensemble, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Manchester Collective, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Ligeti Quartet, Armida Quartett, Dimitris Soukaras, Joseph Havlat and George Fu, and has sung with conductors including Vladimir Jurowski, Sir Andrew Davis, Susanna Mälkki and Geoffrey Paterson.
In 2024, Lotte won the Young Artist Award at the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards, with the citation praising her as ‘a visionary performer, initiating one bold collaboration after another’. She is a past winner of the ROSL Music Competition Overseas Award and Audrey Strange Singer’s Prize (both 2020), Oxford Lieder Young Artist Platform (2019), the inaugural Musicians’ Company New Elizabethan Award (2018) and the 2017 Peter Hulsen Orchestral Song Prize. Lotte is a Young Artist alumnus of Britten Pears Arts (2022), City Music Foundation (2019) and Oxford Lieder (2020). She studied at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music and the Royal Academy of Music, and was subsequently nominated as an Associate of the Academy in 2022 for her services to music.
Lotte is an Ambassador for Donne, a collective of artists supporting women in music, and also regularly records soundtracks for film and TV with London Voices. Lotte is represented worldwide by Askonas Holt.
Biographies
Dimitris Soukaras is a Greek guitarist and arranger based in London. A graduate of the Royal Academy of Music, University of Surrey, and Ionian University, he holds a DipRAM (the Royal Academy of Music’s highest performance award) and is a recipient of over twenty international awards, including the David Russell Guitar Prize and Mottola International Guitar Competition.
Renowned for his work in contemporary music, Dimitris has premiered more than twenty new compositions dedicated to him, including by Grammy winners Leo Brouwer and Sergio Assad, with both of whom he has collaborated. His imaginative programmes merge classical, Baroque and electric guitar. Guitare Classique magazine has referred to him as a ‘virtuoso’ with ‘obvious talent’, while the Greek daily newspaper Kathimerini has called him ‘the classical musician of the young generation’.
His debut album, Roots, released on Naxos in 2021, highlighted works written for him by leading Greek composers. In spring 2025 Dimitris released his second album, Antithesis (PKmusic), featuring works for classical and electric guitar by Brouwer, Assad, Chen and Soukaras. He collaborates regularly with singer Lotte Betts-Dean and accordionist Giancarlo Palena, among others. As a soloist, Dimitris has performed with orchestras including the Athens State Orchestra,
Audentia Ensemble, Filarmonica de Stat Oradea, Orchestra Filarmonica Campana, Athens Academica Orchestra, City of Patras String Orchestra, Ionio Symphony Orchestra, Athens Camerata Junior and Underground Youth Orchestra. He has appeared at major venues including the Musikverein (Vienna), Kings Place and Cervantes Theatre (London) and Megaron Concert Hall (Athens), and at festivals across Europe, Canada and Greece.
In 2024, Dimitris was awarded a PhD for his research on ‘Diversity and Collaboration in Contemporary Guitar Works’, supported by the Academy of Athens and Athena Scholarship. He has studied under distinguished musicians including Costas Cotsiolis, Michael Lewin, Stephen Goss, David Russell, Fabio Zanon, Antonis Hadjinikolaou and his father Nikos Soukaras. He is a D’Addario Strings and AER Amplifiers Artist, as well as a Yeoman of the Worshipful Company of Musicians.
In 2019, Dimitris founded the MUSA Concert Series, a festival in Ancient Korinthos promoting young musicians and chamber ensembles, and with a mission to create bridges between classical music and jazz and folk idioms.
The Past & I: 100 Years of Thomas Hardy
Lotte Betts-Dean mezzo-soprano, James Girling guitar, Ligeti Quartet DCD34307
This collection of new compositions and arrangements by Arthur Keegan shows the profound influence of Thomas Hardy’s poetry on composers throughout the twentieth century and into our own era. Hardy’s characteristic themes are present throughout: the relentless passing of time; nature and the changing seasons; the effects on both of the modern world, with its machines and timetables. Keegan’s Elegies for Emma, for voice and guitar, seeks to restore the voice of Hardy’s first wife Emma alongside the regret-filled poems Hardy wrote after her death.
‘Betts-Dean … provides an admirable range of vocal colours and timbres together with excellent, clear diction’ — Gramophone, September 2024
Stuart MacRae: Earth, thy cold is keen
Lotte Betts-Dean mezzo-soprano, Sequoia DCD34297
In 2021, entranced by his first encounter with the voice of mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean, Stuart MacRae embarked on an extraordinary flurry of compositional activity, completing no fewer than eight vocal works in the space of two years. Sometimes entirely alone, sometimes joined by the composer himself on harmonium or electronics or by the violin-and-cello duo Sequoia (who also contribute two instrumental items), Betts-Dean’s compelling presence is at the very centre of this haunting album.
‘conjures an aural landscape steeped in folk music and medieval lyric, but the result is entirely distinctive and modern … This is music for slow, close listening, beautifully performed’ — The Guardian, August 2023
Benjamin Britten: Canticles
James Way, Lotte Betts-Dean, Hugh Cutting, Ross Ramgobin voices; Natalie Burch piano, Annemarie Federle horn, Alis Huws harp DCD34340
Composed across a period of nearly thirty years for his lover and muse Peter Pears, Benjamin Britten’s five Canticles stand as some of his most intimate and spiritually charged music. Tenor James Way and his duo partner Natalie Burch lead an exceptional line-up of musicians in a programme that also features Priaulx Rainier’s unaccompanied Cycle for Declamation, written for Pears in 1955 – settings of Donne that, in their intensity and introspection, find common ground with Britten’s masterpieces.
‘James Way [is] never less than eloquent, and blends wonderfully with the mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean as the voice of God in Abraham and Isaac …’ — The Times, February 2025
Piazzolla: María de Buenos Aires
Valentina Montoya Martínez, Nicholas Mulroy, Juanjo Lopez Vidal narrator, Mr McFall’s Chamber DCD34186 (2 discs)
According to librettist Horacio Ferrer, the text of this unconventional ‘operita’ was written ‘not to be understood, but to create emotion and atmosphere’. Piazzolla’s music, too, offers a charged mix of classical forms and Argentinian traditions – milonga, canyengue, tango, candombe, payada … Mr McFall’s Chamber present the work’s first major recording since the 1980s.
‘Rhythms are crisp and precise, and the pristine sound brings out plenty of sharply focused instrumental detail. Montoya Martínez, her voice earthy and lived-in, captures the defiance and vitality that drive María on … Exhilaratingly done’
— Gramophone, January 2018
