So I started at university in Stockholm, studying social sciences and law. I got fed up with it at one moment, because we had a teacher who only wanted us to dress correctly, stand correctly nothing was about music. Classical music started very late, in 1992. "I've always been singing - in choirs, in shows, with groups, jazz and things like that. But as soon as I stopped singing, I thought, aargh, let me get off the stage! And I sang - and then everything was fine. One day, when I was about seven years old, they said, 'Miah, can you sing this time?'. I was in this local theatre group and was so shy that people had to push me on stage. But I stayed there just for one year, and then I went even further north, to Skelleftea, and then we moved to Hudiksvall, which is where I actually grew up. I see she was born in Ornskoldsvik - where's that? "Up in the north of Sweden, a nice little town. Not bad for someone who made her debut only in 1998 - and who, at one point, was set to give up music altogether. In Jacobs's recording of Handel's Rinaldo, released by Harmonia Mundi in March, she shares top billing with established early-music stars Vivica Genaux and Dominique Visse. She has appeared in Brussels, Aix-en-Provence, Paris, Montpellier, Innsbruck, Wellington, Cortona her dairy for the next few months contains dates in Vienna, Frankfurt and a Carnegie Hall recital in New York. Within days of leaving the college, in January 2000, she was singing under the conductor René Jacobs in the Berliner Staatsoper. In the late 1990s, while still a student, she was recording Michael Haydn, the Swedish composer John Fernstrom's 1942 Songs of the Sea, and Bach cantatas for BIS, the Stockholm-based independent label. Miah Persson, the soprano soloist in last Friday night's Prom performance of Brahms's German Requiem, is only three years out of the Opera College in Stockholm, and her career is already showing a vertiginous rate of ascent.