What is Paisley Opera?
We are a group of highly experienced professional singers, musicians, stage directors and technicians who have in common a passion for keeping opera alive and about involving local people in the company as much as we can.
Our artistic director, Simon Hannigan moved to Paisley in 2010 and instantly fell in love with the town becoming more and more convinced that Paisley is an ideal place for this long-planned project.
Dare to sing OPERA!
As Urban Opera, we put on our first performance in Paisley at the University of The West of Scotland in December 2015. Since then we have been planning on how best to make the company a real part of this great town.
We want to create a company that the people of Paisley can be proud of. This means creating and staging opera in unpredictable and unusual places close to the streets of the town. It means opening the doors and inviting people in to watch our work and to work with us. This means sharing a great art with great people. It’s a different way of making opera, one that we’ve put a lot of thought, experience and research into.
It doesn’t matter if you have never sung before… One of our tenors had only ever sung on football terraces!
I didn’t know I could sing and didn’t know anything about opera, like most people I thought it was a bit posh and not for me, but now I love it!
It’s tremendously encouraging to see opera initiatives springing up away from the formality of the city theatres.