Fleur Barron

The mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron is of Singaporean and British descent and grew up in Hong Kong and New York. She studied at Columbia University and the Manhattan School of Music. She is currently artistic partner of the Orquesta Sinfónica del Principado de Asturias in Oviedo.

In the 2024/25 season she has sung in Das Lied von der Erde with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Daniel Harding on a tour of Germany, with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra (also under Harding) in Stockholm and on tour to Spain, with the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra under Kent Nagano in the Elbphilharmonie and at the Oregon Bach Festival. She has also performed in Des Knaben Wunderhorn with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra under Nathalie Stutzmann, in Mahler’s Second Symphony with the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana, in the Rückert-Lieder with the Philzuid and at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw in Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder.

Operatic roles that she has performed in 2024/25 include Concepción (L’Heure espagnole) with the Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona, Comrade Chin/Shu Fang in Huang Ruo’s M. Butterfly at London’s Barbican Centre and Galatea in Handel’s Aci, Galatea e Polifemo with La Nuova Musica at the Wigmore Hall. She has also sung Ravel’s Shéhérazade and Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé with the Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona under Ludovic Morlot.

As a song recitalist she has performed with the pianist Kunal Lahiry at venues including Carnegie Hall in New York, toured the USA with the Parker Quartet, and given concerts with Julius Drake in London, Amsterdam, Stuttgart, Madrid, Manchester and Oviedo.

In the 2023/24 season she sang works by Vivier and Stravinsky in a concert marking the opening of the season at the Barbican Centre under Barbara Hannigan, Shéhérazade and Montsalvatge’s Cinco canciones negras under Morlot in Barcelona, Hamburg and Stockholm and the role of Dido in a recording of Dido and Aeneas with La Nuova Musica. She also appeared in Mahler’s Third Symphony with the Czech Philharmonic under Semyon Bychkov, in Mahler’s Second Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde with the Orquesta Sinfónica del Principado de Asturias and in Freya Waley-Cohen’s Spell Book with the Manchester Collective at the Barbican Centre. On the opera stage she performed Penelope (Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria) with the ensemble I Gemelli and several roles in George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill at the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin.

Other highlights of her career have included the title role of Kaija Saariaho’s opera Adriana Mater with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Ottavia (L’incoronazione di Poppea) at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, La Suora Zelatrice (Suor Angelica) with the Berlin Philharmonic under Kirill Petrenko, Olga (Eugene Onegin) for Garsington Opera, Polina (The Queen of Spades) at the Opéra de Toulon and the title role of Carmen for Arizona Opera.

Ensembles with which she has collaborated, along with those already mentioned, include the Munich Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, the Netherlands Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Balthasar Neumann Choir and Ensemble and the Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra.

Her engagements have also taken her to opera houses including the Opéra de Monte-Carlo, La Monnaie in Brussels, the Opéra National de Montpellier, the Opéra National du Rhin and the Cape Town Opera.

She makes her Salzburg Festival debut in One Morning Turns into an Eternity.