Leigh Melrose

Melrose is one of the great character singers of his voice type...

Opera Today

News & Plans

These are strange days and who knows when theatres and concert halls will re-open. As the world headed into the first round of lockdown, I was rehearsing Alberich with the Vienna Staatsoper but their Ring cycle was sadly cancelled. Inevitable further cancellations happened in Madrid and Oslo and so I have had some immensely valuable time home with my family and our crazy cats.

The October performances of Kurtag’s Fin de Partie in Valencia luckily went ahead and so that was wonderful. While there are future plans for Golaud in Geneva and Enescu’s Oedipe with the Komische Oper in Berlin, with the current second round of lockdowns nothing is certain.

There are some amazingly exciting plans in the pipeline for next year and beyond and I can only hope – crossing fingers and toes – that somehow we find solutions to the current situation so performances can go ahead.

Stay safe and best wishes, Leigh.

World Premiere of Whiteley at Opera Australia

Artist, rebel, Icon. Brett Whiteley burst onto the international art scene, all golden curls and bravado. He was dynamic, damaged, a big idea and a bold brush. Heroin was both muse and merciless master. Out of this tumultuous life spilled a messy array of brilliant artworks and astonishing self-reflection. In 2019, this Australian icon meets two of Australia’s most popular artists in a brand new work for the Australian stage: Whiteley, by Elena Kats-Chernin and Justin Fleming. Together they’ve created an opera to honour the life and work of a man who could not extricate his talent from his demons.

Casting British baritone and
contemporary music specialist
Leigh Melrose in the title role was a masterstroke. He sang with resounding strength and incisive clarity in an intensely expressive performance that captured Whiteley’s charismatic charm and his painful, doomed struggle with the darker angels of his nature.

The Australian

With tousled hair and a shambling mix of insouciant brilliance and existential anxiety, baritone Leigh Melrose sang and portrayed the precocious, sometimes unlovable Whiteley with a vocal range from wiry ferocity to ethereal dreaminess, spanning swaggering moments of elan and despair.

Sydney Morning Herald

Melrose is particularly impressive… There is long, languid stretching of the vowels, singing each syllable to its edge, thinning into ethereal transcendence and thickening into anger, and allowing cracking at the manic extremes – as Whiteley did with himself and his work. Melrose’s portrayal is intense and self-consumingly ferocious, and he carries this opera compellingly.

Bachtrack

The world premiere at La Scala of Kurtag's Fin de Partie, with further performances in Amsterdam and Valencia

György Kurtág, whose compositions left an indelible mark on the development of twentieth-century music, had never written an opera. At least, not until he had turned ninety. Applying his bare, concentrated, intensely expressive style to Samuel Beckett’s 1957 austere play, the world premiere was conducted in November 2018 by Markus Stenz and directed by Pierre Audi. Further performances were at Dutch National Opera in February.

György Kurtág

"Shuffling around nervously, Clov (the robustly gruff baritone Leigh Melrose) is characterized in jittery blots of music, as if he consists entirely of punctuation marks."
The New York Times

"...baritone Leigh Melrose [also deserves high praise] who made Clov's powerless anger truly uncomfortable to behold. Tightly wound and hobbling about savagely, at the end when Clov decides to abandon Hamm, or maybe not, he looked as if he were about to blow up."
bachtrack