Happy New Year 2025!

Rebecca had a fabulous time ringing in the New Year with The Edinburgh Choral Union singing The Messiah with conductor Michael Bawtree and wonderful colleagues Emily Mitchell, Sam Jenkins & Jerome Knox

Reviewing Edinburgh Royal Choral Union’s Messiah for The Herald, Keith Bruce writes,

“Rebecca Afonwy-Jones proved the most impressive of the quartet, her voice now in full bloom with an especially rich power at the bottom of her range.”

In Vox Carnyx, The Voice for Classical Music & Opera in Scotland, the following review was posted:

There would be no meaningful victory in Handel’s Messiah without an enemy and the inspired selection of Biblical texts by the composer’s librettist, Charles Jennens, ensures that “gross darkness”, “the heathen”, and nations that “furiously rage” are part of the narrative. It was mezzo-soprano Rebecca Afonwy-Jones’s peerless enunciation of the word “smiters” in her aria He Was Despised that encapsulated the triumph of Christ’s sacrifice in this performance.

Taste in the sound of the vocal soloists is always subjective – and the perennial topic of conversation at the extended picnic interval of the Edinburgh Royal Choral Union’s New Year concert – but Afonwy-Jones, who was a Scottish Opera Emerging Artist in 2011, now has an instrument that is rich-toned across its range and especially impressive in the lower alto voice.