New Zealander CONAL COAD trained in the NSW Conservatorium of music Opera School before joining Opera Australia. He made his European debut with the Opera de Wallonie and has sung with all the major companies of Belgium; in Brussels, Liege, Antwerp, Charleroi, Ghent and Bruges, in the principal bass roles. In France he has sung in Paris, Bordeaux, Montpellier, Strasbourg, St Etienne, Le Mans. Elsewhere in Europe he has performed regularly in Hamburg, Geneva, Lisbon, Venice, Bologna, Naples and Madrid.

He has performed in the UK in Covent Garden, Holland Park Festival Opera, Garsington Festival and Opera North.

Conal performs regularly in New Zealand with the national company.

Conal returns each year for Opera Australia, and has performed many roles including in Fidelio, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (for which he won a Green Room Award), Lulu, Manon (also for which he won a Green Room Award), La Cenerentola, Billy Budd, The Rakes Progress, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, L’Elisir d’Amore, Arabella, Capriccio, Don Giovanni etc. Conal also performs for (for which he was nominated for a Helpman Award), WA Opera, Opera Queensland, SA Opera.

In the USA he has performed in Washington and New York. Conal has also performed in Israel.

Conal regularly adjudicates major singing competitions and teaches in many opera schools.

Concert engagements include work with all major Australian orchestras, Israel Philharmonic, Royal Opera House, La Monnaie Brussels, SSO, NZSO, ACO, as well as festivals in France, Belgium, Germany, Holland, UK, Australia and NZ. Conal supports many charities and has been a guest artist in events including in Kensington Palace, Australia, Belgium (Brussels and Malines) and NZ.

In 2013 Conal will perform in Don Pasquale (title role) and Albert Herring (Superintend Budd), for Opera Australia in Sydney. Future roles also include the UK and Japan.

Recordings/DVDs include: Mozart Bass Arias, NZ at Covent Garden, Mozart Opera Arias, My Beloved Father, Ruaumoko, Orakau (Morrison Trust), Don Giovanni (Leporello) Opera Australia.

Equally at home with opera, ballet, symphony concerts, chamber music and music theatre, as well as teaching and coaching, DOBBS FRANKS’ career has spanned over 50 years of intense and ceaseless international musical activity.

He has conducted over 40 different operas including three world premieres and three Australian premieres. For the Australian Opera he conducted the premiere season of Richard Meale/David Malouf’s Mer de Glâce, the revival of Voss and the now famous tour of Gilbert and Sullivan operas in 1969 which introduced Dennis Olsen to G & S lovers.

Conducting operas as diverse as Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress and Gluck’s Orfeo, Dobbs has appeared in the USA (49 of the 50 states), Japan, Israel, Scotland, Mexico, Canada, Korea, China, Indonesia, Greece, Turkey, Philippines, New Zealand and Australia.

His video recordings for the Australian Opera include Die Fledermaus and The Gondoliers.

Having conducted numerous performances for the Australian Ballet over the years, he was more recently Music Director of the WA Ballet. A guest tutor at the Australian Opera Studio he then became Head of Music for 2 years before its recent closure and has just returned from conducting performances of Verdi’s Falstaff in Tokyo.

MICHAEL HALLIWELL studied music and literature at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and at the London Opera Centre with Otakar Kraus, as well as with Tito Gobbi in Florence. He has sung in Europe, North America, South Africa and Australia and was principal baritone for many years with the Netherlands Opera, the Nürnberg Municipal Opera, and the Hamburg State Opera. He has sung over fifty major operatic roles, including Don Giovanni, Papageno, Count Almaviva, Gugliemo, Posa, Germont, Gianni Schicci, Ford, and Escamillo and has participated in several world premieres and had frequent appearances at major European festivals in opera, oratorio and song recitals.

He has published widely in the field of music and literature and is Vice President and Editorial Board Member of The International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA), regularly giving lectures and seminars on the operatic adaptation of literature into opera. His book, Opera and the Novel, was published by Rodopi Press (Amsterdam/New York) in 2005. He is working on a book on the contemporary opera libretto. Currently on the staff at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, he has served as Chair of Vocal Studies and Opera, Pro-Dean and Head of School, and Associate Dean (Research). A double CD of settings of Kipling ballads and Boer War songs, When the Empire Calls, was released by ABC Classics in September 2005. He has recently premiered Lawrence Kramer’s song cycles, Five Songs and an Epilogue from The Wings of the Dove, Nine Songs to Ezra Pound, and Crossing the Water.

HUW HUMPHREYS, born in London, was a Music Scholar at Winchester College, before reading Music at Oxford University. On leaving Oxford, he joined the orchestral tours department at Askonas Holt Ltd. where he was responsible for the touring activities of many of the world’s great orchestras, including the Berliner Philharmoniker, Boston Symphony Orchestra and San Francisco Symphony.

In September 2002 he became the General Manager of the European Union Youth Orchestra, working closely with Music Director Vladimir Ashkenazy and guest conductors including Bernard Haitink, Lorin Maazel, Paavo Jarvi and John Eliot Gardner. During his three years with the EUYO Huw achieved a variety of objectives in expanding the program, the funding, the marketing and organisation structure.

He joined the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2006 as Director of Artistic Planning. He has chaired the jury of the final of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Young Performers Award, served on the Advisory Group of the Melbourne Music Prize and was on the jury of the 10th Cadaqués Orchestra International Conducting Competition (June 2010).

Huw lives in Melbourne with his wife Miranda and two children, and in his spare time is a keen marathon runner.

PROFESSOR KURIBAYASHI is Vice-Chairman of the International Foundation for Arts and Culture, the principal sponsor of the Australian Singing Competition.

One of the leading figures in Japanese Opera, Yoshinobu Kuribayashi is the Chairman of the Board of Management of NIKIKAI Opera Foundation.

NIKIKAI, Japan’s largest vocalist association, has some 2100 members and stages around 20 opera performances a year as well as negotiating relationships with leading Opera Houses around the world. Japanese tours by leading overseas productions, conductors, and directors sponsored by NIKIKAI include: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg by La Monnaie Opéra; Der Rosenkavalier by Köln Oper; Jenufa by Die Komische Oper, Berlin; and Der fliegende Holländer by Staatsoper Hannover.

Professor Kuribayashi is also the Director of the New National Theatre Tokyo. He is active in educating young vocalists as Professor Emeritus of Tokyo College of Music and performs regularly as a Verdi baritone.

ANTHONY LEGGE studied at the Guildhall, Oxford University and the London Opera Centre, and also studied accompanying privately with Geoffrey Parsons and Paul Hamburger.

His numerous recitals include those with, amongst others, Dame Janet Baker, Sir Thomas Allen, Gwynne Howell and Håkan Hagegård. He has worked regularly with the principal British opera companies, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Opera Australia, many European opera companies and at Bayreuth, where he assisted on the Kupfer-Barenboim Ring cycle for five years and a new production of Die Meistersinger.

He has been Head of Music at English National Opera for 14 years where he conducted performances of Dido and Aeneas, Orpheus and Eurydice, Lulu, and Alcina.

As Music Director of Clonter Opera he conducted Butterfly, Wienerblut, and La Traviata. He was also Music Director of the Mastersingers Company which encourages young Wagnerian singers and for them has conducted Rheingold, Walküre Act III and Siegfried Act III and Götterdämmerung with the Rehearsal Orchestra. He conducted the final orchestra concert at the Spitalfields Festival in London in 2005. He has worked on much contemporary music and Wagner with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. He works regularly for the Nederlandsche Oper in Amsterdam and is a regular visiting vocal coach for the Royal Opera House Young Singers Programme and Opera Australia.

Most recently, he was Director of Opera at the Royal Academy of Music and Music Advisor to Grange Park Opera. He has recorded two CDs with Chandos accompanying Linda Finnie, has a book published by Peters Edition entitled The Art of Auditioning, and appeared as a judge on the Channel 4 Operatunity series. His new book, written with Mary King, ‘The Singer’s Handbook – A guide for aspiring singers’, has just come out, published by Faber Music.

Anthony took up the position of Assistant Music Director at Opera Australia in January 2009.

PETER CZORNYJ was born in Staffordshire, England, and studied musicology, conducting and composition at Hull University (England) and Music Research at Hamburg University (Germany). He is the author of a doctoral dissertation on Telemann and Berlin. From 1992 to 1998, Peter Czornyj was Director of the early music label Archiv Produktion, at Deutsche Grammophon. Following that, he was founding managing director of a small production company and the label Glissando, also based in Hamburg.

In 2001 he was named Artistic Administrator of The Cleveland Orchestra, where he worked with conductors Christoph von Dohnányi, Franz Welser-Möst and Pierre Boulez. In Cleveland he managed a series of successful opera-in-concert performances of a wide range of operas, including Siegfried, Don Carlos, Elektra, Hänsel und Gretel, Le Rossignol, and act two of Parsifal, the latter performed in Cleveland and at New York’s Carnegie Hall, conducted by Pierre Boulez.

In addition, he oversaw a wide commissioning and co-commissioning programme, which included many new works from composers such as Julian Anderson, George Benjamin, Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Chen-Yi, Marc-André Dalbavie, Georg Friedrich Haas, Hanspeter Kyburz, Matthias Pintscher, Kaija Saariaho, Johannes Maria Staud, Rolf Wallin and others.

In 2006 he was appointed to the position of Vice President for Artistic Administration at the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, where he worked closely with Music Director David Robertson.

In August 2008 he joined the Sydney Symphony as Director of Artistic Planning, working alongside Vladimir Ashkenazy in programming the orchestra’s extensive concert and recording activity, and reviving a new music commission programme.

MICHAEL HALLIWELL studied music and literature at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and at the London Opera Centre with Otakar Kraus, as well as with Tito Gobbi in Florence. He has sung in Europe, North America, South Africa and Australia and was principal baritone for many years with the Netherlands Opera, the Nürnberg Municipal Opera, and the Hamburg State Opera. He has sung over fifty major operatic roles, including Don Giovanni, Papageno, Count Almaviva, Gugliemo, Posa, Germont, Gianni Schicci, Ford, and Escamillo and has participated in several world premieres and had frequent appearances at major European festivals in opera, oratorio and song recitals.

He has published widely in the field of music and literature and is Vice President and Editorial Board Member of The International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA), regularly giving lectures and seminars on the operatic adaptation of literature into opera. His book, Opera and the Novel, was published by Rodopi Press (Amsterdam/New York) in 2005. He is working on a book on the contemporary opera libretto. Currently on the staff at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, he has served as Chair of Vocal Studies and Opera, Pro-Dean and Head of School, and Associate Dean (Research). A double CD of settings of Kipling ballads and Boer War songs, When the Empire Calls, was released by ABC Classics in September 2005. He has recently premiered Lawrence Kramer’s song cycles, Five Songs and an Epilogue from The Wings of the Dove, Nine Songs to Ezra Pound, and Crossing the Water.

ANTHONY LEGGE studied at the Guildhall, Oxford University and the London Opera Centre, and also studied accompanying privately with Geoffrey Parsons and Paul Hamburger.

His numerous recitals include those with, amongst others, Dame Janet Baker, Sir Thomas Allen, Gwynne Howell and Håkan Hagegård. He has worked regularly with the principal British opera companies, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Opera Australia, many European opera companies and at Bayreuth, where he assisted on the Kupfer-Barenboim Ring cycle for five years and a new production of Die Meistersinger.

He has been Head of Music at English National Opera for 14 years where he conducted performances of Dido and Aeneas, Orpheus and Eurydice, Lulu, and Alcina.

As Music Director of Clonter Opera he conducted Butterfly, Wienerblut, and La Traviata. He was also Music Director of the Mastersingers Company which encourages young Wagnerian singers and for them has conducted Rheingold, Walküre Act III and Siegfried Act III and Götterdämmerung with the Rehearsal Orchestra. He conducted the final orchestra concert at the Spitalfields Festival in London in 2005. He has worked on much contemporary music and Wagner with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. He works regularly for the Nederlandsche Oper in Amsterdam and is a regular visiting vocal coach for the Royal Opera House Young Singers Programme and Opera Australia.

Most recently, he was Director of Opera at the Royal Academy of Music and Music Advisor to Grange Park Opera. He has recorded two CDs with Chandos accompanying Linda Finnie, has a book published by Peters Edition entitled The Art of Auditioning, and appeared as a judge on the Channel 4 Operatunity series. His new book, written with Mary King, ‘The Singer’s Handbook – A guide for aspiring singers’, has just come out, published by Faber Music.

Anthony took up the position of Assistant Music Director at Opera Australia in January 2009.