An Evening of Spring Romance

Join us for a delightful spring evening filled with a heady bouquet of romances performed by mezzo-soprano Jessica Lawrence-Hares and pianist Olga Elbourn. Experience the themes of love loss joy and nature through the captivating works of Dargomyzhsky Cui Rimsky-Korsakov Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.

Olga Elbourn graduated in 2004 with highest honours from the State Conservatoire in St. Petersburg Russia as a concert pianist piano teacher accompanist and chamber ensemble player. After completing a postgraduate course at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire in 2006 she held a position there for the next nine years as a Senior Accompanist for opera singing and Russian folk instrument classes working with some of the best-known opera singers and folk instrumentalists.

On the concert platform she has collaborated with soloists from leading opera theatres worldwide and has been a member of numerous chamber ensembles in Russia and Europe. She is a prize-winner of several international competitions and in 2007 was awarded the prestigious “Richard Wagner Stipendienstiftung” scholarship in Germany.

Since 2014 Olga has lived permanently in the UK in Cambridge where she continues her extensive performing and teaching career. She is the Principal Accompanist of the St. Ives Choral Society regularly collaborates with various instrumentalists and singers for performances and teaches a large class of piano students.

Jessica Lawrence-Hares received her BM magna cum laude and her MM in voice performance from Boston University. Her operatic roles include Mercedes (Carmen) and Nicklaus (Hoffmann’s Erzählungen) with the Komische Kammeroper München Lady with a Hat Box (Postcard from Morocco) and the Sea (Before Night Falls) with the Boston University Opera Institute as well as Mad Margaret (Ruddigore) the Third Lady (The Magic Flute) and Marcellina (The Marriage of Figaro) with the Cambridge Operatic Society.

She has been a featured soloist in performances of Aaron Copland’s In the Beginning and Mozart’s Requiem in the Boston area as well as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Tuscany. Jess has also performed in the premieres of several new operas including Are Women People? (Mother 2014) and Porcelain and Pink (Lois 2015) by Kate Waring as well as Strange Ghost (Ka Cox 2015) by David Earl.

Her concert repertoire includes Sea Pictures and excerpts from Der Rosenkavalier with the Cambridge Sinfonietta and performances of The Music Makers Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle Vivaldi’s Gloria Mendelssohn’s Elijah Dido and Aeneas and The Canterbury Pilgrims with Choir2000. In 2019 she performed in the premiere of Peddars Way a new work by Kevin Flanagan.

Most recently Jess joined the Lepetit Ensemble for a concert featuring women composers at Hughes Hall and sang Saint-Saëns’ Oratorio de Noël with the Haslingfield Choir and Orchestra.

Visit Jessica’s website for more details https://www.jessicalawrencehares.com/

Host or Publisher The Cambridge Russian-Speaking Society (CamRuSS)