Welsh National Opera are thrilled to welcome three new Associate Artists for our 2023/2024 Season: Emily Christina Loftus, Beca Davies and Melissa Gregory. As WNO Associate Artists the three will receive world-class training and support, with many opportunities to gain performance experience through solo roles in WNO’s operas, concerts and community and engagement work.
Melissa Gregory hails from Australia and is a mezzo soprano who has studied at the Royal Northern College of Music and the Queensland Conservatorium. She has performed all over the world with many opera companies including Glyndebourne, Opera Queensland, Lyric Opera Studio Weimar and the Northern Opera Group. As a concert soloist, she has sung solos in major works such as Verdi’s Requiem and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Melissa already has a great many number of operatic roles under her belt, including major roles such as The Marriage of Figaro’s Cherubino, Ariadne auf Naxos’s The Composer and Dido in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.
West Walian mezzo soprano Beca Davies joins her national opera company as an Associate Artist having studied at King’s College London and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Already well-acquainted with WNO, Beca has sung with WNO Orchestra before in a performance of Tosca at the Llangollen International Eisteddfod and has appeared in a production of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra at the Edinburgh International Festival. Beca has toured Wales with productions of Hansel and Gretel and Mared Emlyn’s Cyfrinach y Brenin, as well as giving UK and world premieres of new operas such as Paul Crabtree’s The Ghost Train and Marco Galvani’s Helena.
Emily Christina Loftus is a soprano from the North of England and a graduate of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the Royal College of Music. Her opera roles have so far included Gretel in Hansel and Gretel, Pamina and Papagena in The Magic Flute and Daughter 2 in Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, having sung at major opera companies around the UK including Opera Holland Park, English National Opera, Opera North, and Glyndebourne Festival Opera. Emily is also currently a Samling Artist and an Oxford Lieder Emerging Artist, having given a recital at the Oxford Lieder Festival opposite the renowned soprano Mary Bevan.
In addition to performing roles in WNO’s upcoming 2023/2024 Season, the Associate Artists will also appear as soloists in the Play Opera LIVE and Opera Gala concerts and will each give a solo performance in 2024’s Associate Artist recital.
To get a flavour of some of the activity that our artists experience, make sure you don’t miss the fantastic opportunity to see them in action in our production of Candide, on tour this Summer.