ENO Orchestra

Under the baton of ENO’s Music Director Martyn Brabbins, our Orchestra, with our Chorus, is at the heart of the company’s artistic life.

The ENO Orchestra performs a diverse range of opera repertoire, from Charpentier’s Medea to Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremburg. In recent years, the ENO Orchestra has also performed a range of work from traditional and modern ballet performance and film scores to our semi-staged musicals.

They have given the world premiere performances including Julian Anderson’s Thebans, Ryan Wigglesworth’s A Winter’s Tale, Nico Muhly’s Marnie as well as UK premieres of Philip Glass’s The Perfect American and John Adams’s Doctor Atomic.

Performances are regularly broadcast by BBC Radio 3 and screened live to cinemas worldwide as part of ENO Screen. Recordings of the ENO orchestra range from Janácek’s The Makropulos Case, to Verdi’s Macbeth as part of Chandos’s Opera in English series. The Orchestra also participates in a side-by-side mentoring scheme, ENO Evolve, in which students from the Royal College of Music shadow ENO players gaining valuable experience of life in a professional opera orchestra.

The ENO Orchestra are passionately involved in the work of ENO Baylis, our learning and participation team, notably taking part in Opera Squad which brings the world of opera to life in the schools across London. In May 2017 the ENO Orchestra performed at the inaugural ENO Studio Live performances, which is part of our investment in talent development.

In 2016 the ENO Orchestra and Chorus won the Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Opera.