Introduction
Thanks to the generosity of the late Past Master Basil Becker, we have been able, for a number of years, to award a scholarship to a student at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.
The Horners have now entered into a new agreement with the Guildhall School of Music & Drama to provide a scholarship for a student attending their two year post-graduate opera course. There is no government grant or funding available for this course so students with limited financial means would not be able to attend without financial support. The recipient of this award is expected to perform for The Livery at agreed events.
The Becker Scholar is a student on the Guildhall School of Music and Drama’s two-year post-graduate opera course. Emyr, our current Scholar, began his two-year course in the Autumn Term of the 2022/23 academic year.
Emyr Lloyd Jones is a baritone from North Wales, studying with Susan Waters at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where he is the Horners’ Becker and the Tobacco Pipemakers’ Scholar on the Opera Course. He holds BMus and MMus degrees from the Royal Northern College of Music. Emyr is this year’s winner of the Pendine International Voice of the Future at the Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod.
At the RNCM, Emyr was the winner of the Betty Bannerman French Song Prize, the English Song Prize, the Joyce and Michael Kennedy Award for the singing of Strauss (2021), the Alexander Young Prize (2019), the James Martin Oncken Song Prize (2018), the Elsie Thurston Prize (2017) as well as the Joyce Budd prize for second place in the Kathleen Ferrier Society Bursary for Young Singers (2017). Emyr was a finalist in the Gold Medal Competition and the Frederic Cox Award for singing.
Emyr’s operatic highlights include the role of Sir Hugh Evans in Vaughan Williams’ Sir John in Love (BYO), Il Conte di Almaviva in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Fiagro, Musiklehrer in Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos, the Forester in Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen and Edmund Bertram in Jonathan Dove’s Mansfield Park (RNCM).