Rachel Nicholls

Nicholls made her debut with The Royal Opera in London as the Third Flowermaiden in Wagner's Parsifal.[6] She returned to Covent Garden to sing Prilepa in Tchaikowsky's Queen of Spades, Pepik in Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen and Echo in Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos. For English Touring Opera she performed the title role of Francesco Cavalli's Erismena, Elisa in Handel's Tolomeo, and Ginevra in Handel's Ariodante. She sang Armida in Handel's Rinaldo at the Edinburgh Festival and Fiordilligi in Mozart's Così fan tutte for La Grande Écurie et la Chambre du Roy conducted by Jean-Claude Malgoire. She performed First Woman – First Fury in Birtwhistle's The Mask of Orpheus: The Arches at the BBC Proms, Nerone in Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea at the New Theatre, Tokyo, Tatyana in Tchaikowsky's Eugene Onegin for Scottish Opera, Jenifer in Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage, Sieglinde in Wagner's Die Walküre and Anne Trulove in Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress at the St Endellion Festival.[1] In 2012, she performed the part of Brünnhilde in Wagner's Ring cycle at the Longborough Festival Opera.[2] Fiona Maddocks reviewed Götterdämmerung in The Observer: "Longborough has found a magnificent Brünnhilde in Rachel Nicholls, a singer so versatile that she has also had a career as a Bach specialist. Full-toned, flexible, accurate and powerful, every gesture, every flinch is persuasive."[7] Nicholls performed her first Isolde in Tristan und Isolde at Longborough Festival Opera in 2015 and shortly afterwards in concert in Tokyo with Yomniuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sylvain Cambreling. In 2016 she performed the role in Paris, the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe, Oper Stuttgart and at Grange Park Opera. In 2017 she sang Isolde for the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra and at the Teatro Regio di Torino. Nicholls made her role debut as Elektra in Basel in 2018 and went on to perform Elektra in Karlsruhe in 2019.

Nicholls has performed with Academy of St Martin in the Fields, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Bochum Symphony Orchestra, the Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra, the Britten Sinfonia, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the Darmstadt Hofkapelle, Florilegium, the Gdansk Music Festival, the Hanover Band, Huddersfield Choral Society, the London Handel Players, the London Mozart Players, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Mikkeli City Orchestra, the Orchestra of St John’s, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Le Parlement de Musique, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, as well as at the Brighton, Chelsea, Fishguard, London Handel and Three Choirs Festivals. She has appeared in both the Valparaiso University and Carnegie Hall, New York, in Bach's Mass in B minor, performed by the Bach Collegium Japan, conducted by Masaaki Suzuki, commemorating the Fukushima disaster.[8][9]