Elena is passionate about working with children’s choirs and discovering ways of helping these young singers grow through choral music.
Children’s choirs (up to 16 y/o) and primary school age choirs (up to 12 y/o)
Since August 2025, Elena has been 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 previous 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 establish 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 established as a progression route.
With a strong, scenic-based approach to choral singing and choral literacy, excellence and inclusion, the choirs aim to give the choral singers a first-hand, high-quality experience of choral singing and performance, which equips them with the vocal and artistic tools to get auditioned main stage roles, such as in La Bohème or Peter Grimmes (2025 and 2026 ON productions) and move on to Opera North Youth Company Ensembles.
Since 2021, Elena has been the Choral Lead of the award-winning music education 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 also works with the National Youth Choir, 9 to 15 y/o choir courses as section coach.
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Elena’s experience in founding, creatively leading and working within primary age choir programmes started in 2015.
She artistically co-led and developed the Voces Blancas del Nalón School Choirs Project for Voces Blancas del Nalón (Voblana). She co-led 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 occasionally 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.