This June marks one year since we relocated to Sheffield. The choice to make this exciting, creative and musical city our home was influenced by the incredible support that we received from the brilliant people and organisations here. Thank you for your encouragement as we continue to get to know you all better.

In April, we hosted our first performance at the Lyceum after relocating, but we have been busy with other projects around Sheffield.

Alongside our full productions of operas, we have an extensive Learning & Participation programme, from an opera for babies to activities with people living with dementia, and everything in between. As part of our Shakespeare season this Spring, we toured The Vanishing Forest, our opera for 7-11 year olds, to schools, libraries and studio theatres around the country, including performances at Athelstan School in Sheffield. Athelstan is one of four partner schools we’re working with over a four-year period to track the long-term impact of children engaging with opera and creativity through our visits and follow up activities. We’re hoping to gather data to support what we have seen, again and again – that music, drama and creativity help children learn across all subjects, and can help them feel happier and calmer too.

The Vanishing Forest is a sequel to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, performed by four singers, cello, clarinet and percussion. It’s performed by the same singers and instrumentalists who also perform in our touring operas, often as principals, bringing the magic of opera to school halls across the country.

Our work in secondary schools includes ETO Perform, in which a team of a Singer, Director, Composer and Stage Manager work with teenagers to write and perform an opera in a day, and the young people then receive tickets to see the full opera that has inspired the workshop. We took ETO Perform - this season based on themes from The Capulets and The Montagues - to Fir Vale School in Sheffield and received this lovely feedback from the teacher:

“I cannot speak highly enough of the ETO team who visited us this week, they were outstanding on every level ... Opera is a very new style of music for most of our students, but the team made it so accessible and engaging for all learners"

ETO Lyrics is our programme of lyric- and song-writing which we deliver in Alternative Provision settings (for young people not attending mainstream secondary education), developed in collaboration with education charity The Difference, in response to a report investigating the crisis in young people’s mental health. We have just finished a 10-week programme of ETO Lyrics at Tracks, in partnership with Sheffield Music Hub. We’re now planning an ETO Lyrics project in Barnsley in the Autumn.

We also commission and create a new opera for Learning Disabled audiences every year, and next season's opera, Little Terror (about dealing with overwhelming emotions - something for all of us, there!) will visit two Special Schools in Sheffield in the Autumn.

We want to show people there are lots of routes into enjoying opera, from music and storytelling to spoken word to design and fashion, and we're working with organisations across the city to highlight these different elements of opera and create new projects. In Autumn 2024 we took a cabaret celebration of women songwriters to Sheffield's Samuel Worth Chapel, and this month we are filming a short opera called The Knot which we commissioned last year, at various locations around Sheffield, with Sheffield Hallam’s Film Making MA students.

As you can see, we’re keen to make the most of our new home. We have big plans to contribute to the creativity of this wonderful city, and thank you all for your continued support.

Robin Norton-Hale,

Artistic Director & CEO