Zita graduated from Royal Holloway, University of London with First Class Honours in Music and in Florence at the Lorenzo de’ Medici Institute. She has been kindly supported by the Nicholas Boas Charitable Trust.
In Opera, Zita has appeared at Opera Holland Park, Opera Della Luna, Olivier Award winning OperaUpClose and in Sydney with Opera Australia. Recent roles have included Dido, Dido and Aeneas (Surrey Opera) and Zerlina, Don Giovanni (Opera in Oborne). Other engagements include Dr Mary in the UK premiere of Doctor Selavy’s Magic Theatre by Stanley Silverman (New Wimbledon Theatre) and Elsa, The Grand Duke (Buxton Festival).
Consort work has included the Bach Choir, St Endellion Festival and Convivium, recording and touring throughout Britain and Internationally. For Naxos, she has recorded Herbert Howells’s Hymnus Paradisi and movie soundtracks for Shrek the Third and Prince Caspian. Zita is the soprano soloist for the Loki Ensemble, a progressive early music group.
This summer Zita was a Britten-Pears Young Artist at the Aldeburgh Festival, working with Bernarda Fink and Anthony Spiri. She has recently finished a second season at Opera Holland Park and was a finalist in the 2016 John Kerr Award for English Song.
German-American pianist Hannah Harnest has been educated at the Conservatoire Supérieur de Paris, and has been awarded a Masters in Solo piano performance from the Royal College of Music, London, as well as an MSc in Cultural Sociology from the London School of Economics. This summer she graduated with Distinction from the Royal Academy of Music, London, where she studied with Michael Dussek, Malcolm Martineau, and Ian Brown, and where she was awarded an MA in piano accompaniment, the Dip RAM, and the Christian Carpenter Prize for the best final recital in her year. As a soloist, Hannah has played with orchestras in Germany, Hungary, France, and Italy, giving performances in the Dohnányi Synagogue in Budapest, the Herkules Concert Hall in Munich, the Guiseppe Verdi Conservatory in Turin, and in the great auditorium of the UNESCO in Paris. As a chamber music partner and vocal accompanist, she has appeared at St. Martin in the Fields, the Wigmore Hall, Steinway Hall, the National Gallery, and St James’s Piccadilly in London, and in the Philharmonic Hall in Munich (concert broadcast live by the Bavarian State Radio - BR), and in the Forchheim Auditorium of the Center for Jewish History in New York.
Together with her duo partner Samuel Berlad, Hannah was invited to the live rounds of the Kohn Foundation/International Wigmore Hall song competition at Wigmore Hall in September 2015. She was also selected as a Britten-Pears Young Artist 2016, where she was working with Bernarda Fink and Thomas Quasthoff in the context of the International Aldeburgh Music Festival, the latter together with Samuel Berlad, with whom she has recently recorded their first CD with a collection of artsong, relating to the theme of travel.
Having been invited to become a ‘Young Steinway Artist’ by the former director of Steinway and Sons, New York, in March 2009, Hannah has received guidance, amongst others, from Roger Vignoles, Margo Garrett, Menahem Pressler, Émile Naoumoff (last disciple of Nadia Boulanger), Olivier Gardon, Stephen Bishop Kovacevich, Robert Levin, Vladimir Krainev, and Levon Chilingirian.
Free recital (retiring collection)