Following on from the huge success of the 2023 Opera Chorus Development programme and their performances in the highly acclaimed production of ‘Tosca’ at the Grand Opera House Belfast, we proudly present our 2024 Northern Ireland Opera Chorus as the feature of this very special showcase.

Our choristers have become one of the greatest assets for our company and through this specialised programme they have worked with industry professionals including vocal coaches, conductors, language coaches, choreographers and movement directors from highly prestigious operas house all over the UK and Europe.

For this concert they will be working with conductor James Grossmith. James studied conducting at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland after studying music as organ scholar of Clare College, Cambridge. From 2005 he worked as Chorus Master and staff conductor at Scottish Opera, Director of Choral Music at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and Director of Chapel Music at the University of Glasgow. In 2014, James was appointed Principal Chorus Master of Kungliga Operan (Royal Swedish Opera), one of Europe’s foremost full-time professional opera choruses, collaborating with many of Europe’s leading conductors. Whilst in Stockholm, James conducted the music for the Nobel Prize Banquet in 2018 to a global TV audience of half a billion viewers, and was conductor for the Royal Swedish Opera’s flagship opera commissions, known as ‘Short Stories’, which are televised annually in Sweden. James returned to the UK in 2022 where he is now Chorus Director of the Belfast Philharmonic Choir and will also take up the post of Chorus Director of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus from September 2023.

This concert will also feature conductor Margaret Bridge who has been working towards this project as part of our Artists in Development programme.

This concert puts these highly accomplished opera practitioners as the centre focus of opera and allows us to perform many varied styles and periods of writing for an opera chorus. Come and enjoy well-loved favourites as well as some lesser known delights. Concert will include works by Purcell, Wagner, Puccini, Verdi, Tchaikovsky and John Adams.

Chorus Reviews
‘ The N. I. Opera Director understands that opera’s long term future here requires the professional nuturing of home-grown talent. The seeds are already bearing fruit’

Theatre News, The Juniper Tree.

‘The locally based NI Opera chorus is, post-Covid, new, recruited through open auditions earlier this year yet already able to produce the vital, full-bodied sound needed for Verdi’s beloved work.’

The Observer

‘Ravishing choruses, as hypnotic as the marquee arias, inject peroidic brio into the musical narrative.’

Theatre News, La Traviata