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by anna jane begley
To say Sofia Kirwan-Baez is a very busy woman is an understatement. When I chat to the 28-year-old musician over a video call one Saturday afternoon, she’s only been back one day from the Alps and is now sitting in one of the swanky rooms of the Dorchester hotel – fresh-faced, make-up on, and ready to play piano for dolled-up guests spending copious amounts of dosh on dainty finger sandwiches and pretty pastry-based concoctions.
A piano session for one of London’s most iconic luxury hotels is, she tells me, merely a side hustle alongside working as a professional soprano, jazz musician and actress. On Tuesday, she’s flying to Hanover to visit her boyfriend who works at the Opera House, before returning to London to do some gigs and the photoshoot with our photographer, then jetsetting to Bordeaux to perform as Papagena in The Magic Flute. Rest, it seems, is simply an afterthought for Kirwan-Baez.
The only thing that rivals Kirwan-Baez’s tightly-packed schedule is her medieval scroll of performance credits: Rosina in Barbiere di Siviglia and Papagena and Pamina in Die Zauberflöte at at the Opéra National de Bordeaux, Musetta in La Bohème at the 2024 Longborough Festival, and Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro at the 2025 Cumbria Opera Festival, to name only a few. Oh, and a debut album, Take One and a Half, she composed herself.
How she has so much energy is beyond me, though her innate sense of drive and curiosity probably has something to do with it. Born in London to a Venezuelan mum and Liverpudlian dad, Kirwan-Baez started playing the violin at the age of five. Was music something she’d simply picked up from a young age, or was it in her blood?
“My dad is a very keen amateur pianist, and he would teach me jazz standards and stuff like that. It was very cute,” Kirwan-Baez says. “My mum has super eclectic musical tastes, and she sang as a jazz singer alongside working in fine art in Venezuela. Her taste ranges from anything from Latin American salsa and boleros to traditional jazz to New Jazz, to rock, rap, pop, folk, you name it.
“My grandma in Venezuela, she studied singing on an amateur level as well. So I grew up in this massive mix of music, and because of all the moving around, I found it amazing that there was this thing that even if you didn’t speak the same language, you could still communicate through music.”
After moving to Caracas, Venezuela, she joined a music outreach programme called El Sistema before her family moved again to France when she was 10. It was there she learnt of the national conservatoire system that would ultimately shape her musical career. “France has this wonderful system that the UK doesn’t have, where there’s a conservatoire for every tiny little village. It’s a state-funded music system. It’s nothing like having private lessons.”
It was as a teenager in France that Kirwan-Baez discovered classical singing. “I was doing all this jazzy pop stuff [at the time] and I associated classical with my grandma. I thought it was like, ‘whoa. How do people do this? I can’t do that!’ And then I went to this first lesson, and it was like holy moly, the sound that I’m hearing in here, I can just release it.
“And classical singing is one of the few platforms, to be honest, for women, where you are not only encouraged but asked to give your full vocal capacity. You’re not told to be quiet. You’re not told to shut up. You’re not told that it’s too much. You’re told that you need to give more, and that you need to commit your whole body, your whole voice, your whole artistry, the whole thing. So then all of a sudden, everything made sense.”
By the time Kirwan-Baez was 18, she couldn’t decide between a performance-based degree or lean into academia. “I threw a net of a million trillion applications to universities in France and in the UK and the US, and all of a sudden I got this acceptance letter from Oxford [to study music]. And I was like, oh shit, okay, I should probably go,” she recalls.
Surely studying music as a purely academic subject rather than performance must have been quite a shift? Did she find it freeing or tedious?
“The French system is hyper-structured; every second of your day, you are scheduled to be somewhere, even if you’re doing fuck all. So I was working like crazy. And then I went to Oxford and it was like, off you go write me 2,000 words. Good luck. Peace and love to you.
“If no one has told me I need to be somewhere, then it’s my time, right? So inevitably, as you might guess, I woke up in like third year, in 500 choirs, doing six million student productions, and just singing my little heart out every day and leaving my essays to 4am to hand it in at 9am.
“Towards the end of the term, [there was] this American teacher from Berkeley called Jason Stanley. I think he liked the weirdness of my brain, but he was so despaired about my lack of dedication to sitting six hours in the library every day. So he said in my review, ‘Sofia has managed to turn her academic undergraduate degree into as much of a conservatoire degree as she possibly could’. So in answer to your question, yeah, it was a bit of a challenge. I was very last-minute with my essays.”
Personally, I’ve always found it odd how people can ‘teach’ an art form when subjects such as music and drama are often personal and intuitive. As Kirwan-Baez demonstrates, sometimes it’s just in your genes, in your blood – or does she think that’s just a romantic myth?
“There’s a big element of myth in there, in so far as that there are a lot more things that we think [of as talent] that are actually skills. I think a lot of music and acting is about self-awareness. But you have to have the motivation and the commitment.
“In terms of the actual music degree at Oxford it is very academic. So it’s not as much ‘we’re going to learn how to make you guys all really good musicians’. It’s more like, ‘how can you critically think through a bunch of information through the lens of music?’ But at a conservatoire, it’s about figuring out your own body, figuring out your own approach to music and what your limits are, what you specifically have to offer. Oxford was a lot less about that.”
Kirwan-Baez then went on to do a master’s at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in Cardiff. “There was a lot of opera, classical singing, where it’s like how to sing in foreign languages and how to kind of tackle a lot of that repertoire and understand it. Then after that, the Welsh College had this amazing Erasmus programme so I got into this three month thing in Florence, in the conservatoire over there. And it was mainly just an excuse to eat a bunch of pizza and pasta and have a great time.
“[After the master’s], I ended up staying with my boyfriend in Cardiff for a couple of months, then with his parents for a bit, then with my parents for a bit. And then it got to a point where I was like, I love you guys, but oh my God, I need my own space. So I got in touch with some family friends and moved to London.”
While working as a barista, Kirwan-Baez made ends meet through various piano sessions. “I waltzed into any hotel that I saw that had a piano, as if I was some kind of diva and be like, I am the thing that is missing in your establishment, you need to hire me. I managed to convince the Marriott Hotel, who had this shitty, small electric piano that they were using as a table, to launch this Sunday lunch playing and singing thing which for me was great, because they would give me a free carvery – best thing ever.”
Following studies at the Royal College of Music Opera School, Kirawan-Baez now juggles opera performances with singing and piano sessions, as well as auditions and constant jetsetting. Take her January for instance: “There was a classical concert on the second, then a concert in Bordeaux on the 14th, but in between all of this, there’s been the piano playing in various hotels, and then on the 20th of January, there was piano lounge night. And the following day it was Bach’s B minor Mass in Winchester cathedral.”
What has been her most challenging role so far?
“There’s this role in the one woman show, the one that’s called La voix humaine, the human voice by Francis Poulin. She wrote this opera that’s like 40 to 45 minutes long, and it’s just a woman on the phone. You don’t know who she’s talking to and the whole process is you figuring out what the situation is between her and whoever she’s talking to.
“I learned it over lockdown and I thought I was going crazy. Sorry for the spoilers, but you find out that she actually tried to kill herself so you find out slowly the severity of her situation. And what was challenging is to not give the game away too soon, but make it clear that this was someone who was in trouble, while also not making her a caricature of female hysteria, a kind of Ophelia type.
“[It was also difficult ] not to put my whole being into it every time, at the brink of suicide every night. So it was definitely one of the most challenging, but now one of the most rewarding [performances].”
What advice would she give aspiring musicians, especially in a political climate that seems increasingly stacked up against artists?
“I think, remember why you’re doing it. It’s not about you. Art is not an accessory. It’s a need. Stay curious. Stay open minded, stay versatile. Don’t let anyone tell you that that art is less good than that art. If you feel a connection with a certain art, go for it wholeheartedly.”
