Olivia recently graduated with distinction from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama Opera Makers MA, where she studied with scholarship in collaboration with the Royal Opera House. She was a Junior Fellow at the conservatoire 2023-24.

 

Her chamber opera Lost Property, written with the composer Anna Disley-SImpson, was performed by the Guildhall's opera studio and nominated for an RPS award. A keen writer of song and poetry, her poem Fall, set for soprano, piano and violin by Ben Pease Barton, premiered in Carnegie Hall in January 2024. She has been commissioned to write a song cycle at Glyndebourne Opera House with Lucy Armstrong, the resident composer with the Balancing the Score programme, based on objects found when clearing out an attic. 

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A workshop version of Scarlet, an opera for five principals and a chorus, plus a 12-part band, with the composer Georgia Barnes, premiered at Blackheath Halls in London in May. It is a retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale with an Imperialist slant, with colonisers pillaging Scarlet’s home, a recently- discovered island. The eyes of Colonel Wolf and his men are firmly fixed on the treasures at Grandmother’s House, which they will attempt to seize at any cost.

 

She was commissioned to write a Christmas carol for the London Mozart Players with the composer Georgia Barnes (2021), Let the Carols Ring, and a micro-opera commission from the Royal Opera House's Jette Parker programme and Casco Phil with Barnes, Everything You Carry, which premiered at St Pancras Station for International Women’s Day in 2022 and is concerned with the metaphorical and physical things we carry with us every day.

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The song cycle Wild Songs, about animal migration, with the composer Siri LIvingston premiered at Poplar Arts Centre in August. Her duet Mudlarking with Pease Barton and the flute/guitar/voice piece An Orange Day with Livingston were part of the Guildhall/Wigmore Hall new works programme, as was Not a Song About Home with Greg May, which premiered in July. 

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Works in progress include The Machine Stops, a chamber opera for two singers and 15-piece band with the composer Sam Meredith. A short 20 minute version premiered at the Guildhall last summer: a longer version (75 minutes) was workshopped earlier this year.  It is based on the EM Forster novel of the same name, set in a dystopian future where humanity lives isolated underground from each other, with ‘the machine’ guiding all daily tasks – but it is not infallible.

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Other works include The Hollow After [composer: Dominic Veall], which  premiered at the Polish Hearth Club 2021 in association with Greenwich Museums], with a narrative based around the shell of a Hermann’s tortoise among the Greenwich museum’s collections and concerning themes of migration, trauma, alienation and the treatment of refugees. Future work includes for the East London Music Group and with Opera Lucerne.  Future 

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