Trinity Laban Symphony Orchestra with Holly Mathieson

New Zealand-born Holly Mathieson is an award-winning conductor, regularly working with opera houses, ballet companies and orchestras in Europe, Australasia and North America. She is the Music Director of Symphony Nova Scotia, in Canada, a partnership that is attracting acclaim for its bold programming, strategic acumen and championing of local artists from diverse musical backgrounds. She frequently records for BBC Radio 3 and CBC, and her first major commercial recording with Decca, a collaboration with Isata Kanneh-Mason and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, reached #1 on the UK classical charts. Her work has seen her travel to nearly every continent on the planet, and perform for audiences spanning from the British Royal Family and Europe’s political elites, to Scotland’s homeless and refugee communities. In addition to her conducting work, Holly is on the board of Directors for London-based opera company formidAbility, an opera company pioneering the commissioning and producing of opera with accessibility at the foundation of the creative process, and was Artist-in-Association at English Touring Opera, 2020-2022.

Medb Brereton-Hurley’s passion for conducting stems from her student years at Trinity College Dublin. Graduating with a first-class honours degree in Music and English Literature, she played the tenor horn in the award-winning Drogheda Brass Band, participated in several Royal Irish Academy of Music performing groups, and conducted the Trinity Orchestra for two years. As a founder and co-artistic administrator of AMGE (the Annual Music Graduate Exhibition) – where nine original compositions by Irish music graduates premiered in November 2022 – she premiered her own choral composition and conducted it in concert. For the past two years, Medb has been the Studio Conductor of Irish National Opera, working on Tosca, Guillaume Tell, Der Rosenkavalier, Werther and Così Fan Tutte (2022-23), as well as Faust, La bohème, Salome, and La Traviata (2023-24). This July, Medb conducted the INO Orchestra and youth hip-hop collective the Kabin Crew in a theatrical showcase of their music – including viral sensation ‘The Spark’ – at The Everyman. She was also recently awarded the Orchestra Prize in the final of the Orchestral Conducting competition in the Feis Cheoil 2024, having conducted the RTÉ Concert Orchestra.