A graduate of St John’s College, Cambridge and the Royal Academy of Music, the baritone Leigh Melrose has sung, among others, Demetrius (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, Figaro (Il barbiere di Siviglia) at New York City Opera, Silvio (Pagliacci) for Welsh National Opera, the bass-baritone parts in Britten’s Death in Venice at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, Papageno (Die Zauberflöte) and Marcello (La bohème) for Opera Zuid, Sid (Albert Herring) at the Salzburger Landestheater, Opéra Comique in Paris and Opéra de Rouen, and Ned Keene (Peter Grimes), Papageno, Count Almaviva (The Marriage of Figaro), Rodolfo (Leoncavallo’s La bohème) andJunius (The Rape of Lucretia) for English National Opera. In the contemporary field he has given the world premiere of Johannes Kalitzke’s Die Besessenen at the Theater an der Wien and Elliott Carter’s On Conversing with Paradise at the Aldeburgh Festival under Oliver Knussen, among others, and has also sung Punch (Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy) in Porto, Xenakis’s Ais with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Proms and Berlin Festival, and Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Martyrdom of St Magnus at the composer’s St Magnus Festival, Orkney, in Edinburgh and Inverness.