Opera singer Peter Brathwaite shares his passion for five very different singers whose voices, artistry and lives inspire and move him, and whose stories he needs to tell.

‘A voice like yours is heard only once in a hundred years’: so said conductor Arturo Toscanini to Marian Anderson, the African American contralto whose concert on Easter Sunday concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 became a defining moment in America's civil rights movement.