Conductor

Fergus Sheil

Salome, La traviata

Biography

Fergus is the founding artistic director of Irish National Opera. He has conducted a wide-ranging repertoire of 47 different operas in performance, recordings and on film. Highlights include Verdi’s Aida, Brian Irvine and Netia Jones’s Least Like The Other — Searching for Rosemary Kennedy Rossini’s La Cenerentola, half of 20 Shots of Opera, Strauss’s Elektra and Beethoven’s Fidelio (Irish National Opera). He has also conducted Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, John Adams’s Nixon in China, Rossini’s The Barber of Seville (Wide Open Opera), Mozart’s Don Giovanni and, in 2017, the first modern performance of Robert O’Dwyer’s Irish-language opera, Eithne (Opera Theatre Company), which was subsequently recorded and issued on CD by RTÉ lyric fm. He has has appeared with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, the Ulster Orchestra, the Irish Chamber Orchestra and other orchestras at home and abroad. He has toured the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra throughout Ireland in Beethoven’s Choral Symphony and Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. As a choral conductor he has worked with the State Choir Latvija (giving the world premiere of Arvo Pärt’s The Deer’s Cry) and the BBC Singers. Internationally he has fulfilled engagements in the USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia, the UK, France, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Malta and Estonia. Before founding Irish National Opera he led both Wide Open Opera (which he founded in 2012) and Opera Theatre Company. Since 2011 he has been responsible for the production of over sixty different operas, which have been seen around Ireland and in London, Edinburgh, New York, Amsterdam and Luxembourg.

May 2022