LEAH-MARIAN JONES

Welsh mezzo-soprano Leah-Marian Jones has appeared with leading companies including the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; English National Opera; Welsh National Opera; Opera North; Scottish Opera; The Metropolitan Opera, New York; Théâtre du Châtelet; and Angers-Nantes Opéra. This season she makes her role debut as Mrs Herring in Britten’s Albert Herring for English National Opera, with performances in London and Manchester.

A graduate of the Royal Northern College of Music and the National Opera Studio, she was a Company Principal at the Royal Opera House for eight years, performing over thirty roles including Dorabella (Così fan tutte), Maddalena (Rigoletto), Tisbe (La Cenerentola), Annina (Der Rosenkavalier) and Flosshilde (Das Rheingold, Götterdämmerung).

As a freelance artist, she has sung Carmen (La Tragédie de Carmen), Jezibaba (Rusalka), Baba the Turk (The Rake’s Progress), Kabanicha (Kátya Kabanová), Meg Page (Falstaff), Hansel and the Witch (Hänsel und Gretel), Hippolyta (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Marcellina (Le nozze di Figaro), and numerous Wagnerian roles in Der Ring des Nibelungen. She has also appeared in contemporary works, including Mohammed Fairouz’s Al Wasl in Dubai with WNO, a Welsh-language Così fan tutte with Opra Cymru, and, most recently as the Queen of Snowdon in the newly commissioned opera film Tanau’r Lloer / Fires of the Moon. Composed by Gareth Glyn with a libretto by Iwan Teifion Davies and Patrick Young, and based on the novel Un Nos Ola Leuad (One Moonlit Night) by Caradog Prichard, the film premiered at the 2025 Edinburgh Festival. Building on this range of work, she has increasingly focused on character mezzo repertoire.

International engagements include The Young Doctor (Palestrina) at the Metropolitan Opera; Junon in Platéein San Francisco; Falstaff and La traviata in France; Kátya Kabanová in Nancy; and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Palermo.

On the concert platform, she has performed with the Hallé Orchestra under Sir Mark Elder, the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican, at the BBC Proms, and in gala performances alongside Luciano Pavarotti and Sir Bryn Terfel. Her discography includes Britten’s Paul Bunyan (Chandos). She has also hosted her own TV series on S4C and appeared as a soloist on the BBC2 programme Diva, Diva, Diva with Lesley Garrett.

August 2025