On the eve of her Australian Brandenburg concerts the firebrand coloratura reveals the parts that other singers are afraid to show.

Halfway through my interview with Simone Kermes she fixes me with a provocative look and says: “Do you want to see my vocal cords? I want to show you my vocal cords.” It’s a gesture typical of this reincarnation of the wild-women of the Baroque. “For a singer it’s like you are naked”, she says. “Like you take off your clothes for Playboy”. She takes a few minutes to rifle though her trusty smartphone during which she warns me that what I am about to see may be quite confronting as apparently many people think they look like certain other body parts.

“Nobody is showing the cords because if they are not healthy you can see it”, she says proudly, displaying a series of up close and intimate shots of her vocal apparatus. “I wanted to put them in the last album but Sony said ‘no Simone, you cannot put them in the book’. I said ‘why not?’”

Kermes is here in Australia for a series of concerts with Paul Dyer and the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, the latest in...