Outstanding achievement in Opera Il trittico, Scottish Opera
Our annual Young Talent Awards highlight the wealth of emerging talent across the country, and celebrate artists for whom 2023 was a notable breakthrough year.
The Critics’ Circle Awards are unique, decided by the country’s most experienced professional arts journalists and critics on the basis of hearing the widest range of performances across the UK and Ireland.
Our Outstanding Achievement in Opera Award recognises the unique value of the ultimate collaborative art form, and celebrates the ambition and achievement of British opera companies.
The Music Section of The Critics’ Circle comprises 90 of the country’s most respected critics and music journalists. Membership of the Circle is by invitation.
YOUNG TALENT (piano)
Growing up in Kazakhstan, Alim Beisembayev’s first musical experiments came with a small toy piano he got his parents to buy him at the age of five. He never looked back. After training at the Purcell School, and at the Royal College and Royal Academy of Music in London, he was the deserving winner of the Leeds Piano Competition in 2021. In 2023 he shot to stardom with a performance at the Proms – with two days’ notice – of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto, described in inews as “the kind I thought we could hear only in our dreams”.
The year was bookended by the release of a remarkable recording of Franz Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes, full of poise, power and passion, and a Wigmore Hall performance of Beethoven’s Appassionata that showed a maturity beyond his years. Alim is an undemonstrative performer who possesses in spades all the attributes of virtuosity, taste and musicianship that should take him to the top.
YOUNG TALENT (instrument)
Beauty of tone, individuality of personal sound, flawless technique, flexibility, adaptability, musical curiosity – these are the foundation of Johan Dalene’s mesmerising performances. The Swedish-Norwegian violinist was Gramophone’s Young Artist of the Year in 2022, last season was Young Artist in Residence at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, and for 2024-25 is Artist in Residence with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. He’s been taking the strings world by storm, praised by our critics on a 360-degree spectrum of admiration – for his shaping of the music, the sense of inspiration, the musical instinct, the insights into the inner workings of the score, but perhaps most of all for the sheer enchantment that his sound can bring us.
YOUNG TALENT (voice)
Born in Nigeria, Francesca Chiejina moved to the USA at the age of nine and grew up in Michigan. She started singing while at university, and after a thorough apprenticeship at the Guildhall School in London, and on the Jette Parker young singers’ programme at the Royal Opera House, her first starring roles came with characterful and highly-praised performances at English Touring Opera and Nevill Holt Opera. 2023 represented a real breakthrough, with outstanding appearances in all three operas of Scottish Opera’s Il trittico culminating in a spirited and lovable Lauretta, and showing a dramatic and emotional range to match a versatile and beautiful lyric soprano voice that brings real impact to repertoire from Handel to Michael Tippett. Other notable performances in 2023 included Alban Berg’s early lieder and Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, and the title role in Semele with Blackheath Halls Opera that was a complete musical and dramatic delight.
YOUNG TALENT (conductor)
2023 brought Dinis Sousa’s big chance, and he made the most of it.
After coming to London from his native Portugal at the age of 18 to study film, he quickly switched to piano studies at the Guildhall School. Soon he was organising concerts and conducting. In 2021 he became principal conductor of the Royal Northern Sinfonia, putting it on “a fast track back to the premier league” as Richard Morrison wrote. For several years he was assistant conductor at the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra until events in 2023 thrust him into the hotseat. He grasped the chance with both hands, conducting storming performances of Berlioz’s Les Troyens in London, Salzburg and Berlin. “Sousa was electrifying in moments of grandeur, high drama and emotional intensity,” wrote The Guardian. He underlined his early-music credentials with performances of Handel in London and New York, and continues his outstanding work with his own orchestra of Portuguese émigrés, Orquestra XXI. Sousa has the surest feel for both the detail and the grand sweep of a score, and always brings an electric sense of excitement and drama to his conducting.
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN OPERA
At a time when all major UK companies are facing severe financial challenges, Scottish Opera’s bold decision to present Puccini’s operatic triptych in its entirety – something not attempted north of the border since 1957 – resulted in outstanding success. Founded on Charles Edwards’ richly imaginative sets and graced by Hannah Clark’s excellent costumes, all lit by Ben Pickersgill, Sir David McVicar’s brilliantly intelligent naturalistic productions of all three operas brought consistent focus to the completely different dramatic schemes involved. The large casts had no weak links: several participants took roles in more than one opera with absolute conviction. Company music director Stuart Stratford once again showed his mettle in maintaining superb musical values throughout the three shows.