Grammy-nominated soprano Carole Farley performs at the Bermuda Festival tomorrow.Her performance will incude ‘The Human Voice’ a highly evocative piece by French composer Francis Poulenc.“Even if you don’t understand every word, you can get the gist of what is going on,” she said. “You can understand the emotion. The music speaks for itself. Of course, it is better if people do their homework, and know what it is about before they come.”Ms Farley has appeared at the Bermuda Festival before, singing Mozart arias with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.“I have fond memories of performing in the Bermuda Festival,” she said. “We also came through Bermuda on a ship, so I know it fairly well. The French programme I will be performing in Bermuda is wonderful. I just did it in France last summer and in New York last autumn. It is very evocative in the first half. It will include pieces by Baudelaire, Debussy, Parney and Ravel. The second half is a production of a classic opera ‘The Human Voice’, by French composer Francis Poulenc. He based this opera on a famous play written by Jean Cocteau. It has been done many times as a play and film, on television and in the theatre.”The plot line is that the main character’s lover has just told her that he wants to leave her for another woman. It is a 40-minute monologue done as a telephone conversation. It gets more and more dramatic as it goes along.“At the end something very dramatic happens,” she said. “People will really enjoy it, because I will be staging it as if they were in an opera theatre. People who really like opera will really like this. People who think they don’t like it should give it a try because I think they will like it.”Ms Farley is originally from Idaho and speaks five languages Italian, Spanish, French, German and English. She sings in ten languages including Russian.She found it to be one of the more challenging languages to sing in, but that hasn’t held her back. During her career she has performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York as Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Shostakovich. She was the only non-Russian in the cast.Ms Farley grew up in a musical family, but not in one oriented toward opera. She demonstrated a talent for singing early on and won area talent competitions. As a young woman, she was drawn to opera because it was a combination of music and theatre. She studied at Indiana University and received a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Hochschule für Musik, in Munich, Germany.“They put me in a small town in Germany where no one else spoke English,” she said. “I learned German pretty quickly.”She made her Metropolitan Opera debut aged 19 in the title role of Lulu, a role she has repeated more than 100 times in German, English, French and Italian. In 1972, she became the youngest leading soprano in the history of the Cologne Opera and set a record of 15 curtain calls on the opening night of her performance as Lulu.“‘Lulu’, by composer Alban Berg, is a 20th century opera that is dramatic and difficult,” she said. “It involves 24 costumes, and five wigs. I was singing on stage the whole time. The first time I sang in United Kingdom I did the English premiere of the opera. The stage director had me swinging from a trapeze in the air while singing this horribly difficult music. In opera, sometimes you have to sing lying on the floor. You have to be able to do all these things.”Ms Farley, 66, compared being an opera singer to being an athlete. She said it was physically demanding and required a high degree of fitness and health. She goes to the gym regularly and tries to do as much exercise as she can, indoors and outdoors. In addition to singing, Ms Farley has recently moved into voice training, something she never had time for before because she was too busy. Now, she is trying to make the time, so she can pass on some of her extensive knowledge.“What I want to do is coach people and help them to pursue their careers,” she said. “When you are just starting out, sometimes it is difficult to know what to do, and what roles to take. I was incredibly lucky, because I got work right away. I had this Fulbright to study in Munich. I auditioned for an agent and he sent me the next day to audition at an opera house.”Since then, her more than 100 performances of Richard Strauss’ ‘Salome’ in opera houses around the world have been highly-acclaimed. She has sung at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Canadian Opera and the Oper der Stadt Köln. Highlights in her career include the Paris production of ‘The Merry Widow’ and ‘Lulu’ for the Teatro Regio di Torino in Italy. Her performances of Poulenc’s ‘The Human Voice’ (La Voix Humaine) and Menotti’s ‘The Telephone’ have been filmed by Decca in co-production with the BBC, and now reissued on DVD.Ms Farley has appeared on a number of CDs including ‘William Bolcom: Songs’, a landmark album that received two Grammy nominations in 2006.Her performance at the City Hall Theatre tomorrow is at 8pm . Tickets, $65 for adults and $25 for students, are available at www.bdatix.bm online, All Wrapped Up in the Washington Mall or Fabulous Fashions in the Heron Bay complex.Useful websites: www.bermudafestival.org; www.carolefarley.com.