Growing up in apartheid South Africa had its share of trauma for the lyric soprano who dreamed of a career on the opera stage.

Were you always surrounded by music?

There is a lot of choral music in South Africa. I was singing in church, school, community choirs – that’s when I was not studying or looking after my youngest brother.

You grew up in a South African township and moved around a fair bit with your mum and brothers. Was that hard for you?

When you are in this type of environment, as a child you don’t think: “Oh, this is difficult”. You have nothing to compare it to, really. You feel something is not alright, and years later you think:  “That was a horrible childhood”.

So you saw a lot of terrible things?

Yes. It was towards the end of apartheid and people were marching. It was a power struggle among political parties, between the state police and the black people of South Africa. Sometimes you’d have people marching with placards of Mandela. There was a party called UDF [United Democratic Front], and police would shoot at people with rubber bullets and tear gas – sometimes with real bullets. If that...