Elena is passionate about working with children choirs and discovering ways of helping these young singers to grow through choral music.
Children choirs (up to 16 y/o) and primary school age choirs
Since August 2025, Elena is the Music Director of the Opera North Children’s Chorus (ONCC). She’s also collaborated with the ensemble in rehearsals and artistic projects in the past few years:
• Conductor (deputy): Opera North Children’s Chorus soundtrack recording of ‘Somewhere’ 2024, a short film for Sky Arts produced by Enon Films and Opera North.
• Taking rehearsals as deputy since 2021, she has rehearsed with ONCC works such as: All King´s Men – Richard Rodney Bennett, Arion and the Dolphin – Philip Godfrey, Water Diviner´s Tale – Rachel Portman, Wonderland Restored – Will Todd, All Summer in a Day – Alec Roth, and children´s choir specific repertoire.
Elena helped stablish in 2022 and since then she artistically directs, the In Harmony Opera North Choir. This is a non-auditioned training children’s choir formed of singers from six different primary state schools within the In Harmony programme of Opera North. The choir rehearses separately weekly and gets together twice a term. In 2025 the IHON Saturdays’ Choir is stablished as a progression route.
With a strong scenic-based approach to choral singing and a focus on choral literacy, excellence and inclusion, the choirs aim to give the choral singers a first-hand high-quality experience to choral singing and performance before they move on to the Opera North Youth Company Ensembles.
Since 2021, Elena has been the Choral Lead of the award-winning programme In Harmony Opera North (IHON). She is responsible for writing and developing the choral strand of the IHON Curriculum, delivering weekly curricular choral sessions across seven different primary schools – working with around 1500 primary school children from culturally diverse backgrounds every week-, and leading extracurricular choir rehearsals.
Elena worked as Section Coach for the National Youth Choir 9 to 15 y/o choir course in April 2025.
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Elena’s experience on founding, creatively leading and working within primary age choir programmes started in 2015.
She artistically co-lead and developed the Voces Blancas del Nalón School Choirs Project for Voces Blancas del Nalón (Voblana). She co-lead the musical progression routes for singers from state school choirs to the main concert choirs, founded five primary school choirs and musically directed three from 2015 to 2020. Elena ocasionally coached the Children´s choir Voblaninas from 2015 to 2020, and founded and musically directed the Sonidopolis Pop Academy Children’s Choir in Gijón, Spain from 2017 to 2020.
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Get in touch for the full bio/work experience, and have a look at some of Elena’s work on her social media platforms.