ASSOCIATE ARTISTS
We work with an extraordinary group of composers, librettists, singers and instrumentalists, sound and lighting designers and production staff.
Read more below about our Associate and Guest Artists, whose particular skills and imagination bring a huge amount to each new piece.
Sianed Jones
August 1959 - 2 February 2022
Sianed was a composer/performer with an upbringing steeped in the choral and poetic traditions of Wales. Language and song were the driving force of her work; improvisation and collaboration, with other artists and art forms at the core of her creative practice.
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We miss her greatly and have produced an archive of here work here.
Lisa Cassidy
Coloratura soprano
Lisa Cassidy is a Britten Pears Young Artist and a prize-winning graduate of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. She has appeared alongside artists including Judith Howarth, Malcolm Martineau and actress Eleanor Bron and performed extensively across Europe and the UK.
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Career highlights include a contemporary adaptation of Lucia di Lammermoor, in Vigo, Spain, co-developed with conductor, Ramón Souto and Vertixe Sonora Ensemble and Undead and Other Tales with artist Grace Schwindt, which opened at the Royal Academy in London.
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Lisa has choreographed, designed and self-directed numerous performances of the intense operas La voix humaine by Francis Poulenc and Ian Hÿtch’s Lady Macbeth is Dead, which was composed for her.
Recent highlights include opening the season for Norwich’s Assembly House Classical series, with pianist Somi Kim, performing at Benjamin Britten’s former home and contemporary works for the Something Raw Festival at the Frascati Theatre in Amsterdam.
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Lisa is passionate about sharing the joy of vocal technique and has created an online SING KAIZEN course. This uses the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement, alongside Chakras, tai chi and pure vocal technique to open the voice and waken the imagination.
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Jeremy Avis
Tenor
Jeremy Avis has worked internationally as a soloist of both Early and Contemporary music, as a choral and theatre band conductor and as a choral composer. He also trained as an ethnomusicologist, studying xylophone playing in Cameroon for 2 years.
He has also been team-leader on arts curriculum design projects for the EU in Botswana and, with Rebecca Askew, wrote and delivered a large-scale project for UNHCR in Dzaleka refugee camp in Malawi.
Jeremy currently sings with Bristol-based vocal trio Brave Colour Nature, Belinda Sykes's early music band, Joglaresa. He's also on a mission to revitalise empty shops with his gig-theatre funk group, the Doomsday Dance Band.
He is working on The Whispering Dome for the Brighton Early Music Festival. This is a large-scale piece about bird and human migration, for instrumentalists, singers and choirs.
He also works with the Stroke Odysseys project as composer, soloist and vocal animateur.
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Sharon Durant
Soprano
Sharon is an internationally renowned vocalist, teacher and composer.
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She was awarded an OBE in the 2022 Queen's Platinum Jubilee Honours list for Services to Music and to the community in Newcastle Upon Tyne.
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She currently works for Sing Up as Partnership Manager, and runs choirs across the North East.
Sharon also works regularly for the British Council, delivering their World Voice programme in locations as diverse as Columbia, Sierra Leone and Morocco, and delivers sessions regularly for Music in Hospitals.
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She was previously Vocal Programme Leader at Sage Gateshead.
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Sharon also performs as part of Mouthful, a four piece vocal ensemble who push the boundaries of vocal possibility and successfully devise and compose new vocal material.
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Helen Chadwick
Composer
Helen has composed songs for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, English Touring Opera, the BBC, the Royal Court, the British Museum, Protein Dance, and for theatre-on-film and film projects.
Helen also creates and performs song-theatre to commission, including Dalston Songs (Royal Opera House), War Correspondents (Birmingham Rep) and Truth (South Bank Centre). Site-specific choral commissions include The Singing Circle (Royal Opera House), Where Two Worlds Touch (Salisbury Festival) and A Body Of Song (Greenwich Festival).
Helen’s performances and concerts move between beauty, humour and profundity and her songs are influenced by her meetings with singers in many parts of the world as well as by classical music, folk song and multiple polyphonic song forms.
As well as writing lyrics, Helen has created songs that are settings of poets’ words from across the world, some who are little known or who have been persecuted for their ideas. For other songs she creates lyrics from testimony and from interviews, enabling unheard voices and ideas to reach our ears and hearts through song.
Recordings include ten albums, one track of which was featured on Desert Island Discs. Singing credits include for Meredith Monk concerts and the film TROY.
Awards: The President's Award from WaterAid for creating Sing For Water, and an Honorary Fellowship from Dartington College of Arts.
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Orlando Gough
Composer
Orlando Gough is a composer (and sometimes lyricist, librettist, music director, MC, recording engineer, cookery writer), who writes operas, choral music, music-theatre, music for dance and theatre, and creates large-scale site-specific work.
Some recent projects:
I Look For The Think a short opera about love and stroke:
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Staging Schiele, a dance piece with the Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company, about the artist Egon Schiele, featuring the voice of Jon Baker
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Solar, music for a lighting installation by the artist Bruce Munro, featuring the voices of Sianed Jones, Sian Croose, Jeremy Avis and Jon Baker
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Albion, a look at British music - William Byrd, Napalm Death, Elgar, Ronald Binge, Sugarbabes…... in collaboration with the viol consort Fretwork and the composer/dj Gabriel Prokofiev.
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Coming and Going, a book about Brighton, published by Uniform Books.
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Adrian Lever
Musician
An accomplished multi-instrumentalist with a Masters degree in Sonic Arts, Adrian has developed a sound practice based on field recording and instrumental response.
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Confluence Project (2015) was a multi-media piano improvisation performance piece inspired by water flow-forms and his East Anglian coastal home, performed at venues in London and Norfolk. The piece is one of several developed with sound artist Bill Vine.
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His major work Watermark brought together the rivers of Stara Planina in south-east Serbia with body recordings, and included a dual-prepared-microtonal piano set-up responding to both.
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As a guitarist and Bulgarian tambura (long necked lute) player, he performs regularly at major folk festivals in the UK and Europe with Alma, Stepling, James Patrick Gavin and Arhai.
He played for 8 years with Laura Cannell as the award-winning folk and early music experimentalists Horses Brawl.
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Esther Morgan
Poet
Esther Morgan’s four poetry collections are published by Bloodaxe Books. Her first collection, Beyond Calling Distance (2001) won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was short-listed for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. This was followed by The Silence Living in Houses, Grace, shortlisted for the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize and, most recently, The Wound Register which traces the impact of the First World War through several generations of one family.
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Born in 1970, she grew up in rural Worcestershire. She began writing poetry seriously during a stint as a volunteer at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, Cumbria, before arriving in Norwich to do an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Since then she’s been involved in the poetry world as an editor and teacher, including helping to set up The Poetry Archive and her current role on the Advisory Board of The Rialto poetry magazine. She lives on the Norfolk/Suffolk border and works as Communications Manager for Norfolk Museums Service.
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