Aidan Edwards
Baritone Aidan Edwards, from West Yorkshire, graduated from the Royal Northern College of Music with a BMus(hons) and MMus with distinction. During his time there Aidan performed the roles of Bottom (A Midsummer Nights Dream), Frank (Street Scene) and was the winner of the Elizabeth Harwood Prize.
Operatic engagements include Germont (La Traviata) Opera Holland Park YAP and Westminster Opera, Tsar (The Tsar Has His Photograph Taken) Scottish Opera, Antonio (The Gondoliers) NGSOC, Marco (Gianni Schicchi) Lez Azuriales Opera, Marcello (La Boheme) Eugene Onegin (Eugene Onegin) and Escamillo (Carmen) Opera On Location, Louis (The Wandering Scholar) Melchior (Amahl and the Night Visitors) Northern Opera Group, A Policeman (La Boheme) King Dodon (The Golden Cockerel), Duca Alfonso (Lucrezia Borgia) ETO.
Aidan’s extensive outreach and education work includes the awarding winning Opera North SingUp! production The Water Diviner’s Tale by Rachel Portman, several years performing with Scottish Opera on their Pop-Up Opera Roadshow touring streamlined operas across Scotland and its Highlands and Islands and English Touring Opera’s production of Paper & Tin which performed in schools across the country. Aidan also teaches singing privately and is a workshop practitioner for Grange Park Opera’s Primary Robins programme.
A keen recitalist, Aidan enjoys an annual performance with Soprano Juliet Montgomery at the Scottish Arts Club as part of the Edinburgh Festival for six years running and the pair have continued to perform together across the UK, France, Germany and Ukraine. He has appeared on Radio 3’s ‘In Tune’ and was the baritone soloist for the UK Premiere of Pendereski’s ‘Seven Gates of Jerusalem’ performed at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester. Aidan is an Alumnus of Lez Azuriales Opera. In 2023 he enjoyed great succes as Alfonso d’Este in ETO’s ‘Lucrezia Borgia’ and returned last year for Lescaut in Manon ‘Lescaut’. He has also appeared with Opera North and Scottish Opera.
“As Duke Alfonso, Aidan Edwards delivered that swagger with aplomb, a bass voice that was powerful and elegant even as it was filled with villainous venom. His partnership with the tenor was to be relished musically as much as it was dramatically. Edwards definitely won the battle of the entrance arias, potently announcing his vengefulness in ‘Vieni: la mia vendetta'” BACHTRACK, ETO Lucrezia Borgia
“We caught Aidan Edwards back in 2018 when he sang Germont in the Opera Holland Park Young Artists performance of Verdi’s La traviata and his feeling for 19th-century bel canto seems to have developed even further. His performance as Alfonso was one of those that had you regretting that at this period, baritones were not given big things do to. But Edwards brought a real sense of style and luxurious quality to his singing. He was a rich voice which seemed infinitely malleable, and he made the murderous character of Alfonso alarmingly engaging and not a little sexy.” PLANET HUGILL
“As Lucrezia’s ruthless third husband Alfonso d’Este, baritone Aidan Edwards supplies plenty of malign vigour in a role originally created by a bass; once again, this is healthy, grandly scaled singing.” THE STAGE
” Aidan Edwards’s Alfonso brought things to life every time he stepped to the fore, his tone dark and malignant, his bearing charismatic and pressing.” OPERA TODAY
“While the smooth-voiced baritone Aidan Edwards sang with a great stage presence as Alfredo’s father, Germont. Edwards played Germont as a genuinely and emotionally aware authority figure without having to show pithy sentimentality, which worked compatibly on stage as well.” TRENDFEM
“The Giorgio Germont of Aidan Edwards was a robust, solid, baritone voice of great authority.” OPERA SPY