Conductor
Elaine Kelly
Faust, La bohème, La traviataBiography
Elaine Kelly is the resident conductor of Irish National Opera. Upon her appointment in late 2021, she conducted a national tour with Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse. She made her US debut in Emma O’Halloran’s Trade/Mary Motorhead in New York’s Prototype Festival in January, and her Los Angeles Opera debut in the same double bill in April. She also conducted nine new works by Irish composers in INO’s internationally praised 20 Shots of Opera in 2020 as well as the film of Amanda Feery’s A Thing I Cannot Name in 2021. She held the position of studio conductor in the INO Opera Studio from 2019–21, and worked as assistant conductor and chorus director on performances of Rossini’s La Cenerentola, Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio, Puccini’s La bohème, Strauss’s Elektra, Donnacha Dennehy and Enda Walsh’s The First Child, Beethoven’s Fidelio, Bizet’s Carmen, and films of Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse and Gerald Barry’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. In March 2022 she was invited to work as assistant conductor on Opéra National de Bordeaux’s production of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore. In 2014 she won the inaugural ESB Feis Ceoil Orchestral Conducting Competition which led to engagements with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. She was Musical Director of the University of Limerick Orchestra (2019–21), the Dublin Symphony Orchestra (2017–19) and has worked with the National Symphony Orchestra, Dublin Youth Orchestra and Cork Concert Orchestra. Elaine is a BMus and MA graduate of the MTU Cork School of Music.