Fleur Barron

The versatile mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron has essayed music ranging from Monteverdi to experimental contemporary ensemble works. She is the curator of the 2024 East West Fest mounted by the Orquesta Sinfónica del Principado de Asturias. Barron was born in Newtownards, County Down, Northern Ireland. Her father, Brian Barron, was a BBC news correspondent who moved frequently, and she spent just the first few years of her life in Northern Ireland. Barron has stated that her father's profession suited her temperamentally to a career involving frequent travel. Her mother was Singaporean. Barron grew up in Hong Kong. Although her father enjoyed opera, Barron preferred pop music and dreamed of a career on the Broadway stage. She was told that her voice was more suited to opera than to musicals and, moreover, that her dance skills were not up to snuff. Barron gave up singing and earned a comparative literature degree at Columbia University in New York. While living in New York, she took the opportunity to attend a production at the Metropolitan Opera, and the experience reawakened her interest in singing. Barron earned a master's degree in vocal performance at the Manhattan School of Music. In 2018, she appeared on the album Winter Fragments: Chamber Music by Michael Berkeley. Barron has a strikingly varied repertory for a young singer. In the 2022-2023 season, she sang the role of Ottavia in Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea at France's Aix-en-Provence Festival, and she was slated for an appearance in that composer's Il ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria during the 2023-2024 season with the touring Baroque ensemble I Gemelli. At the other end of the chronological spectrum, she appeared in the title role of Kaija Saariaho's opera Adriana Mater in a San Francisco production directed by Peter Sellars with the San Francisco Symphony under conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. Barron has appeared at top houses in various countries, including La Monnaie in Brussels, Belgium, and she sang the role of Carmen at the Arizona Opera. Barron's experience as a concert singer is wide, including, among many other appearances, those with the Czech Philharmonic in Mahler's Symphony No. 3 at the Baden Baden Festival in Germany and both Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde and Symphony No. 2 with Orquesta Sinfónica del Principado de Asturias; for the latter group, she was appointed curator of the orchestra's 2024 East West Festival. Barron has toured as a recitalist with accompanist Julius Drake, appearing in Britain, Ireland, Denmark, the U.S., and Spain. She has appeared with various chamber groups, including the Swedish contemporary ensemble O/Modernt, with which she performed at London's Wigmore Hall. In 2023, Barron appeared with the Baroque ensemble La Nuova Musica on its recording of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas on the PentaTone Classics label.
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