Sam Hird

Baritone Sam Hird joins the Jette Parker Artists Programme in the 2025/26 Season. He is a graduate of the Opera Studio at the Royal College of Music, where he also completed a Master’s with Distinction and was awarded the Tagore Gold Medal. He is a Samling Artist, an associate artist with the Sinfonia Smith Square orchestra, and is generously supported by the Josephine Baker Trust and the Richard Silver Scholarship. Hird won the 2024 Clonter Opera Prize and the Peter Hulsen Orchestral Song Competition with the Sinfonia Smith Square, and was the 2023 joint winner of the Prix Thierry Mermod at the Verbier Festival, where he was part of the Atelier Lyrique.

Recent roles include Danilo (The Merry Widow), Count Almaviva (The Marriage of Figaro), Ramiro (L'heure espagnole), Biagio (Don Giovanni Tenorio), and Ambassador (La bella dormente nel bosco) at the Royal College of Music; Peer (Grieg's Peer Gynt) with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; baritone soloist in Brahms' Ein Deutches Requiem with the Liverpool Philharmonic; and as a Rising Star at the Shipston Song Festival. He made his Wigmore Hall debut in 2024 in a recital with songs by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Joseph Horovitz. 2025/26 Royal Opera roles include Baron Douphol (La traviata), Mityukha (Boris Godunov), Marullo (Rigoletto) and Mark, Hewson and Krumpelblatt in the JPAP chamber productions of The Departure by Elizabeth Maconchy, Making Arrangements by Charlotte Bray and Four Sisters by Elena Langer. Cover roles include Papageno (The Magic Flute) and Schaunard (La bohème).