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Thanks to prolific careers both as pianist and award-winning broadcaster, Iain Burnside is one of the UK’s best-known musicians.
Iain has worked with a broad roster of international singers: Dame Margaret Price, Rosa Feola, Ailish Tynan, Joyce DiDonato, Laurence Brownlee, Roderick Williams, and Bryn Terfel, among many others. He has recorded more than 60 CDs, often created around neglected composers, where his curatorial skills are displayed to the full. He is a great champion of young singers, playing a crucial role in introducing them to a wider audience.
Innovative programme planning has led Iain to expand his concert work into a hybrid form of music theatre, creating staged work around Brahms (Shining Armour), Wagner (The View from the Villa) and Gurney (A Soldier and a Maker). He has broadcast extensively on both radio and TV, notably as host of BBC R3’s acclaimed Voices series.
In addition to a long association with London’s Guildhall School, Iain is Visiting International Artist at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, Dublin. He is Artistic Director of the Ludlow English Song Weekend and Artistic Consultant to Grange Park Opera, Surrey.
Sydney-born Yvonne Kenny is one of the most distinguished sopranos of her generation. She made her London operatic debut in 1975 in Donizetti’s Rosmonda d’Inghilterra. After winning the Kathleen Ferrier Competition she joined the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where her roles have included Pamina (Die Zauberflöte), Ilia (Idomeneo), Marzelline (Fidelio), Oscar (Un ballo in maschera), Susanna (Le nozze di Figaro), Adina (L’elisir d’amore), Liu (Turandot), Aspasia (Mitridate) and Donna Anna (Don Giovanni). She has built herself an enviable international reputation as a dazzling interpreter of Handel’s soprano roles including tile roles Semele and Alcina (Covent Garden, La Fenice, Opera de Nancy), Romilda/Xerxes/English National Opera/Bayerische Staatsoper, Cleopatra/Giulio Cesare (Green Room Award), Armida/Rinaldo/Opera Australia and Deborah/BBC Proms.
Yvonne Kenny was made a Member of the Order of Australia for Services to Music in 1989 and in 1999 was conferred an honorary Doctorate of Music by the University of Sydney. She is Professor of Voice at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama and teaches at the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme of the ROH Covent Garden.
Robert Holl has been one of the best-known Lied interpreters and concert singers for decades. He has been particularly interested in the lied and concert repertoire, but has also appeared regularly on the opera stage. He sang the great Wagner roles such as Hans Sachs, King Marke and Gurnemanz at the Bayreuth Festival, the Vienna State Opera, the Deutsche Oper and the Berlin State Opera, among others.
Robert Holl is regarded as one of the great lieder singers of our time. He has a particular fondness for German and Russian lieder. The singer feels particularly close to the work of Franz Schubert. Lieder recitals have taken him to the Schubertiade Hohenems and Schwarzenberg, the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, de Doelen Rotterdam and many times to Wigmore Hall.
As artistic director of festivals and Schubertiades in the Netherlands and Austria, he realises special programme concepts and offers his students a common stage. As Artistic Director, he has been organising the successful Schubertiade Dürnstein since 2008.
Paul Kildea was a Young Artist conductor at Opera Australia when in 1997 he made his debut with Neil Armfield’s landmark production of A Cunning Little Vixen, after this assisting Simone Young throughout Europe, returning in these years to Opera Australia to conduct The Barber of Seville, La bohème, and The Turn of the Screw. He has subsequently conducted throughout Australia and Europe, including guest appearances with the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra, Ensemble 2e2m in Paris, the Nash Ensemble in London, the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra, and for the Aldeburgh Festival, where during a four-year appointment as Head of Music he conducted an exceptionally broad repertory.
Paul Kildea holds an honours degree in piano performance and a master’s degree in musicology from The University of Melbourne – where he is Honorary Principal Fellow and, in 2016, a Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellow – and a doctorate from Oxford University. He gives lecture-recitals throughout the world and is the author of many articles and chapters on music and culture in the twentieth century as well as two acclaimed books for Oxford University Press on Benjamin Britten (Selling Britten and Britten on Music), a composer whose work he has made a speciality on the podium as well as in print. Penguin Press published his major new biography of Britten, Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century in 2013, the composer’s centenary year, which is widely acknowledged as the best book on its subject: it was excerpted for BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week (read by Alex Jennings) and acclaimed by the Financial Times as ‘unquestionably the music book of the year’.
Before joining Musica Viva, Paul was formerly Artistic Director of Wigmore Hall, London, and of the Four Winds Festival in Barragga Bay, New South Wales.
Actor, writer and director Simon McBurney is one of the most innovative, mercurial and influential theatre-makers working today. In 1983, he co-founded the company Complicité, and since then all his work has been made through a deeply researched and highly collaborative process which fuses a profound belief that all aspects of the theatre should challenge the limits of theatrical form.
As well as writing and creating original works, Simon has brought great plays and adaptations to the stage, including: The Master and Margarita (2012), Beware of Pity (2015) and most recently, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2022). He also adapted Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising into a 12-part dramatisation for radio alongside author Robert MacFarlane for BBC World Service in 2022.
Simon’s work continually returns to political, social and philosophical questions of the way we live, think and act as a society and he is unafraid of melding the most ancient of theatrical forms with the most recent aspects of modern technology. These aspects of Simon’s work are all present in the award-winning The Encounter (2015), described as ‘one of the most fully-immersive theatre pieces ever created’ by the New York Times. In 2021, he co-directed Fehinti Balogun’s Can I Live?; a vital digital performance about the climate catastrophe which follows Fehinti’s personal journey into the biggest challenge of our times.
From September 2024 Andrew Comben was appointed CEO of Britten Pears Arts, a pioneering music, arts and heritage charity based on the Suffolk coast at The Red House and Snape Maltings. Britten Pears Arts emerged from the creative partnership of composer Benjamin Britten and his professional and personal partner, singer Peter Pears. Andrew was Chief Executive for Brighton Dome and Brighton Festival from 2008, having previously worked in classical music for Wigmore Hall, Aldeburgh Music (Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme) and Young Classical Artists Trust. At BDBF he established the Guest Director model for Brighton Festival (with artists such as Anish Kapoor, Laurie Anderson, Kae Tempest, David Shrigley and Lemn Sissay) and developed a new vision for the organisation as a year-round centre of artistic activity, involving all areas of the community in the performing arts. Andrew has also overseen the expansion of the organisation’s work with communities and young people. His efforts include the operation of music education hub Create Music across Brighton & Hove and East Sussex and the restoration and redevelopment of the Corn Exchange and Studio Theatre into world class spaces for the performing arts.
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