George Robarts
Baritone
George Robarts (baritone) has made successful debuts in the past year at opera and song festivals across the UK. He appeared alongside Graham Johnson OBE at Leeds Lieder Festival 2023, performing Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin at the Howard Assembly Room. A versatile singer and actor, last summer he starred in Longborough Festival Opera’s opera-drama production of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen adapted around Shakespeare’s original A Midsummer Night’s Dream (★★★★★ The Stage, Plays to See), playing the Drunken Poet and the spoken role of Bottom.
Alongside Thomas Eeckhout, he has performed song cycles by Butterworth, Vaughan Williams, Ravel, Ibert and Tippett at Milton Court Concert Hall. In 2022 he appeared at the Levine Auditorium with pianist Edward Picton-Turbervill, performing an eclectic evening of songs and poetry from the German Resistance 1933-45.
Further operatic appearances in 2023 included Leporello Don Giovanni (Cumbria Opera Group), Claudio Agrippina (Hampstead Garden Opera), and Escamillo Carmen (Longborough Playground Opera). He joined the choruses of Opera Holland Park for Rigoletto and Stravinsky’s Les Noces, and Nederlandse Reisopera for Korngold’s Das Wunder der Heliane. This summer he joins Garsington Opera to cover Starveling in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and sing in the chorus for Platée and Un giorno di regno.
George graduated with Distinction from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, where he studied as a postgraduate under Robert Dean. He previously read German and Italian at Oxford University, graduating with a First in 2017. He is a Garsington Opera Alvarez Young Artist, a Longborough Festival Opera Emerging Artist, and is the winner of the Paul Hamburger Lieder Prize 2023.
Alongside singing, he is also a prizewinning translator, with several musical publications including Diedrich Diederichsen’s Aesthetics of Pop Music (Polity Press, 2023) and a study by Jenny Haase on Schubert’s Winterreise in contemporary fiction (ed. Joanna Neilly, MHRA, 2024).
