Tsakane Valentine Maswanganyi: From Soweto to the Festival Hall

Tsakane Valentine Maswanganyi is standing before the mirror in the best dressing-room the newly refurbished Royal Festival Hall has to offer (it has its own Steinway). Make-up brush poised, she's describing what she was taught to do as a child if she got tear gas in her eyes. "There was one type you could calm down with smoke and one you could calm down by splashing water in your eyes," she says thoughtfully. It's one of several anecdotes – always modestly, quietly told – about growing up in Soweto under apartheid that make the 28-year-old soprano's London debut in the lead role of Carmen Jones next week all the more remarkable.

On the morning of her first preview performance, the RFH is a hive of noisy activity, but in the haven of her dressing room, the leading lady is giggly and relaxed, in spite of having to cram an interview, a photo shoot, make-up and a sandwich into her lunch break.

As she talks, she's constantly turning round, spreading her arms to emphasise a point, or constantly making eye contact in the mirror, checking that I'm listening. Several pairs of bejewelled silver stilettos are strewn about the floor and an impressive range of cosmetics stands by the mirror.

For now, Maswanganyi is bare-faced and dressed down in a khaki shirt dress, gold sandals and hoop earrings, her hair sticking up in a wild halo. She's strikingly beautiful, though she says her looks are not integral to the part: "Sexiness is somebody else's opinion."

When I ask how she's feeling, she responds with a sunny: "I'm OK, how are you feeling?" I explain that I was asking if she was nervous about the imminent performance. "Oh, sometimes you do get a little bit nervous – which is good for me, because I tend to go the other way of not being nervous enough. Last night, we had a dress rehearsal and about 500 people turned up. It was good to do it in front of people."

She's itching to get on stage and start playing Carmen Jones, the " hip-swinging floozy" with an insatiable appetite for men and an unhealthy interest in "spooky stuff" – as Oscar Hammerstein's libretto puts it. His musical adaptation of Bizet's opera, with an all-black cast, opened on Broadway in 1943 and ran for more than 500 performances. In 1954, Otto Preminger directed a film version starring Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge, whose unforgettable, sizzling performance earned her an Oscar nomination, making her the first black actress to be so honoured. (Nearly 50 years later, when Halle Berry became the first black actress to win the best actress Oscar, she dedicated it to Dandridge.)

Set in America's wartime Deep South, it re-imagines Prosper Mérimée's original tale of a cigarette girl in 19th-century Seville as the mouthy employee of a parachute factory. Carmen seduces a naive young GI named Joe, teasing him away from his sugar-sweet fiancée Cindy Lou. But she's soon falling for the charms of the prize boxer Husky Miller – a deliciously renamed Escamillo, whose toreador theme becomes "Stan' Up an' Fight" – and the stage is set for the tragic love triangle.

Bizet's opera score remains in place throughout, but is given a fizzy musical-theatre twist with a libretto whose numbers include "Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum", "De Card Don't Lie" and "Dat's Love". This combination of a challenging operatic score (the London Philharmonic and the Philharmonia will take turns to accompany at the Royal Festival Hall) with the showiness of musical theatre should come naturally to the South African soprano, as Maswanganyi has spent four years as one-quarter of the crossover pop/opera group Amici Forever.

Jude Kelly, artistic director of the South Bank Centre, is directing this flagship production. She explains: "I had to find somebody who could really sing Carmen Jones; it's a heavyweight role. But you're also looking for someone who's physically convincing as somebody who is really striking and has a kind of mystery. Tsakane conveyed those things. She wasn't interested in just playing a sultry femme fatale."

Kelly has shifted the action from 1950s America to 21st-century Cuba and roped in choreographer-to-the-stars Rafael Bonachela (still best known for his work with Kylie Minogue) for some salsa-inspired dance routines. Maswanganyi, who relaxes by doing lambada dance classes, has loved working with him: "He likes the way I naturally move," she tells me.

For Maswanganyi, Carmen Jones is the embodiment of a free spirit. " She's a character who is free to do what she wants. She doesn't like it if things don't go her way. Everybody else is almost just there to fill out her life, rather than her putting something into their lives. What's important for her is to get what she wants."

Maswanganyi layers on the make-up for the afternoon ahead – smoky black eyeshadow, deep berry-red lips, rouged cheeks – and seems to take on something of Carmen's abrasive character. "She doesn't feel bad about anything she does. The funny thing is that I don't feel like a bad person. Musically, I, Tsakane, used to feel sorry for Joe, especially in the final duet. But when you get into character, all that music has to not bother me at all. That was a journey I had to make – to stop being Tsakane, who is affected by the music."

She adds. "Carmen hasn't got beautiful music to sing. Cindy Lou and Joe have the sympathetic music, where you feel sorry for them. The role doesn't have show-stoppers, which is fascinating for me. I like V C that it doesn't give you time to say, 'Ahh, you're dying'."

She's wanted to play the role for as long as she can remember – in fact, ever since she saw an ice-skating version as a child. "Do I think I've got something in common with her? Y'know, she gives me something and I give her something. I believe that all women have a little bit of Carmen in them."

Maswanganyi, of course, is in a long line of artists to tackle the role. Since the Paris premiere of Bizet's opera in 1875, the work has undergone many transformations, including a film version in 1948 starring Rita Hayworth, a gender-bending ballet from Matthew Bourne (The Car Man, in which Carmen becomes a mechanic) and an MTV hip-hopera starring Beyoncé Knowles and a host of rappers.

Nor is Maswanganyi the first Carmen from South Africa. In 2005, Mark Dornford-May's film set in the Khayelitsha township, with a libretto sung in Xhosa, won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. But some things never change: "I'll be wearing a red dress, as Carmens do..."

This Carmen was born in the sprawl of townships and suburbs that make up Soweto, in south-west Johannesburg, on 14 February 1979 (hence her middle name). Her mother left Soweto to marry in Giyani, in the Limpopo Province in northern South Africa. For the first eight years of her life, in keeping with tradition, Maswanganyi remained with her grandparents in Soweto. Her upbringing by her grandfather, a priest, and grandmother, a teacher, was "quite strict" – "I didn't play around a lot in the week" – but also a "very close, very rooted and very earthy" childhood, growing up surrounded by cousins.

"I'd say my family had the middle-class black person's life in Soweto – which is different from the middle-class person's life in the white community," she says. "Soweto has a different spirit." Among her memories of growing up under apartheid, two stand out. "There used to be shootings, but I didn't experience that directly. Sometimes the army would come by in cars and let off tear gas. We'd be playing in the garden and suddenly you'd have to get inside and lock the doors," she says. "Sometimes the police would come and start knocking and bashing doors in for no reason. In those days, people were not allowed to have visitors – even your cousins or family – you'd have to have some kind of permission to have people visit you."

Maswanganyi then lived with her parents in Giyani, "from about eight years old, right through to being a naughty teenager". She was soon roped in to sing in the local choir – her mother was the choirmistress – and in church choirs as well.

Schooled in the Bantu system, which denied its black pupils such luxuries as music lessons, this became her education as she honed her voice in the a cappella sound of the African choral tradition. When it came to choosing a career, she knew that she wanted to be a musician but dismissed the idea as little more than a pipe dream.

"I wanted to study music at university, but from the prospectus it seemed you had to have studied music to study music. So I thought, 'Oh, that's doomed then. I can't do that.'" She embarked instead on a degree in public relations at the University of Pretoria. "I did that for about a week and was not happy at all."

A student mentioned that it was possible to do a one-year "bridge" course for a music degree. She switched immediately and began to learn the basics – how to read music, the classical sound. "Before that, I hadn't had any formal training," she says. "It was all at home, singing with my mother." Her classical knowledge had been limited to watching an opera on television when she was 13 ("I was gripped by it. I thought, 'Wow, that's amazing'") and a couple of arias from Messiah, which she had learnt for a singing competition.

Maswanganyi was benefiting from the greater possibilities that followed the release of Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid, but she still felt its consequences. "It takes time for the whole country to be integrated and more equal. I grew up, not poor, but I couldn't afford what white people could. At university and opera school, you're friends with people of all different colours, which is wonderful. But you know that for you, your education, your Mum is using up all her pay. When you have to write an assignment, there's no way you can have a computer, you have to write 20 pages by hand. If you had a concert you'd try to find a dress so you're glamorous on stage – but you don't have a car to get home. All that is the result of the apartheid period. But it made me want to succeed."

And succeed she did. By the final year of her four-year course, she was singing at the State Theatre in Pretoria. She watched the international soloists on stage from her place in the chorus, wanting to be in their place. Then came a further three years studying opera at the Pretoria Technikon. In her first year she sang her first full role, the lead in the Hungarian operetta Gräfin Mariza, from where she was picked to sing it professionally at Roodepoort City Opera. She sang for world leaders at the 2002 UN summit in Johannesburg, and has sung twice for Mandela. "That was amazing – standing on stage and singing the national anthem for Mandela," she recalls. "I remember it being very emotional and very rewarding at the same time."

After graduating, she was cast as Maria in West Side Story for the Spier Opera in Cape Town. There she met Stephen Higgins, now associate musical director for Carmen Jones. They kept in touch and he later tipped her off about an opportunity to join a new band. "I came over, listened to the music. I remember I had about five minutes to decide if I was going to move to the UK and join the band. I liked it here so I thought, 'Yeah, why not? Jump in!'"

Amici Forever – four improbably good-looking, classically trained singers from all over the world – is another success story in the lucrative "popera" market. Since their debut album The Opera Band was released in 2003 and nominated for a Classical Brit, their brand of classical hits performed with the pop glamour has sold 1.5 million worldwide. "It's not like a classical recital," Maswanganyi says. "You wear the shortest dress you want to, which at the Wigmore Hall perhaps wouldn't be appropriate. Our audience varies from opera buffs to people who think it's utter rubbish. My feeling about it is that we're just doing something we enjoy. If people enjoy it with you, great."

After Carmen Jones, Maswanganyi will rejoin her bandmates to work on their third album. She admits, though, that her heart lies in opera roles. " We're all, individually, people trained to be soloists. Of course, our first love is performing as soloists."

Based in Sydenham, south-east London, for the past four years, she's now looking to further her career in London and sing "the usual soprano roles" – first and foremost, Bizet's Carmen. She goes to see her family in Soweto and Giyani twice a year, but is aware that her future lies on the world stage. "I love South Africa and it's my home. I love the earthiness, the red soil, the hot sun. But in terms of singing opera, there isn't as much opportunity. Of course it's difficult to leave home and live in different places but when you're training, you're mentally prepared to explore." She smiles. "Wherever my singing leads me, I will go."

'Carmen Jones', Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 (0871 663 2500), to 2 September

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