Liz is delighted to announce she is now being represented worldwide by Costa Peristianis at Ikon Arts.

Liz says “I am delighted to be joining the impressive roster of artists at Ikon Arts. I feel very at home amongst these creative musicians and am looking forward to working with the team on some exciting projects. I am hugely grateful to Maxine Robertson, my previous agent, and wish her well in her retirement.”

Liz’s new details are at https://ikonarts.com/artists/singers/elizabeth-watts/ and Costa can be contacted at costa@ikonarts.com

Liz has been delighted to start 2026 touring with Mark Wigglesworth and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. It was a special treat for her to sing in her home town of Taunton and also to make her debut singing in the refurbished Bristol Beacon, with its exceptional acoustics. Seen and Heard’s Chris Kettle writes

”The centrepiece of each half brought the soprano Elizabeth Watts to the stage: with her personal warmth and sense of fun she is the ideal person to introduce the music and to get the audience simmering nicely. Her rapport with us was instant: mind you, it must be a lot easier to warm up the Beacon’s lively and appreciative audience (half warmed up already by the exhilarating atmosphere generated by the hall itself) than to do it in one of London’s comparable halls. But the fact that she entertained us so successfully with her speaking voice cannot take precedence over the excellence of her singing and her dramatic sense.

She has the power for Wagner and the carefully calibrated delicacy and precision for – I was going to say Mozart, but you know what I mean. Her top register was thrilling, and pingingly accurate: it was a magnificent display of singing. ‘Sounds of my Homeland’ was genuinely touching, and ‘Adele’s Laughing Song’ was so superbly done that we had no need to encourage her by polite tittering. We were in awe. In the second half (in a second dress) she had us humming along to her beautifully sung ‘Vilja Lied’, and her comically steamy introduction to ‘Meine Lippen’ from Giuditta had us hanging on every word.”

Further tour dates are 9th January 7.30pm, Weymouth Pavilion and 10th January, 7.30pm Fareham Live.

Here’s to 2026!

Liz jumped in at 24 hours notice to sing a wide and varied programme (some of it new!) with the exciting Fantasia Orchestra, directed by Tom Fetherstonhaugh, making their Smith Square Hall debut. The repertoire, on the theme of bird song, ranged from Strauss to Sherwin and exploited Liz’s love of all types of music.

The Times wrote “”It’s always a pleasure to listen to Watts, armed with a voice without any weak spots and kinks, always deployed with warmth, good taste and palpable feeling.”

“Watts herself particularly excelled in the voluptuous leaps required for Strauss’s Frühling and the bird-free drama of the Countess’s aria Dove sono from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro”

The Arts Desk also praised “the revelation of her full, richly coloured tone married to textural meaning in Strauss’s “Frühling””, commenting that her “Dove sono” was a model of fine articulation and expressive urging.” and “To cap it all, Watts showed she was just at home in natural delivery of Kosma’s “Autumn Leaves”.

A standing ovation was the result of Liz’s directing and sing-directing concert with the amazing Bristol Ensemble on 19th November. The best quote from a audience member goes to the woman who said to Liz afterwards, “I don’t mean to be rude, but when you stopped singing, I just said “F************ck”. Another nice response was from an eminent professor who said that it felt like Liz, as she directed and sang at the same time, was creating the music on the spot. Liz and the ensemble are planning a rematch.

After singing her first War Requiem with the Bach Choir in 2024, Elizabeth will sing it twice more this season. Her first is with the Outcry Ensemble conducted by James Henshaw, at Southwark Cathedral, London. This is will bring together multiple amateur choirs to commemorate Remembrance Day.

Her second will be in Ely Cathedral on 24th January 2026, using the combined forces of the Cambridge University Orchestra, the Britten Sinfonia and several Cambridge college choirs, conducted by Ludovic Morlot.

Liz says it is a privilege to sing this profoundly moving and extraordinary work, by a composer she has a deep connection with.

After Liz’s “consummately serene” (The Times) performance of Bliss’s Beatitudes at the 2025 BBC Proms here are some more 2025-6 season highlights to look forward to…

18th September 2025: Liz gets her Union Flag out for a gala of Last Night favourites with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. 7.30pm, Hull Town Hall

4th October 2025: A recital of English song with Julius Drake at the Two Moors Festival. 11am, Dulverton Church

19th November 2025: Liz’s debut with the Bristol Ensemble, where she is conducting as well as singing. 7.30pm St Georges, Bristol

20th December 2025: Liz returns to the Huddersfield Choral Society for their legendary Messiah. 7.15pm, Huddersfield Town Hall

January 2026: New Year’s favourites with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Mark Wigglesworth. Various dates Poole, Taunton, Bristol, Weymouth and Fareham.

16th March 2026: Telemann’s Ino cantata with Floreligium CD launch. 7.30pm Wigmore Hall

28th & 29th March 2026: Beethoven 9 with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Tan Dun. 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall and 3pm Symphony Hall, Birmingham

16th, 19th, 20th May 2026: Britten Les Illuminations with the Britten Sinfonia. 7.30pm King’s Place, London, 7pm The Apex, Bury St Edmonds, 7pm The Halls, Norwich

2nd June 2026: Premiere of James MacMillan’s Angels Unawares with The Sixteen. 7pm Cadogan Hall, London

Elizabeth’s performance of Richard Blackford’s The Black Lake and Britten’s Les Illumination has brought praise from the critics for her “humdinger of a performance” (Church Times).

John Quinn of Seen & Heard wrote:

“This quite exceptional performance by Watts was one which I was delighted to experience. My seat was at quite some distance from the platform but thanks to the excellent CCTV pictures I was able to see the soloist very clearly during her performance. Watts sang the work from memory and consistently demonstrated great communication skills and a deep engagement with the words and music. There was no artifice in her performance, yet her gesticulations – never overdone – and her wide range of facial expressions vividly put across the sense of what she was singing. But these attributes alone would not have been sufficient had the quality of her singing not been on a similarly high level. So, for example, in ‘Phrase’ she demonstrated a very fine control of the vocal line and offered sensuous singing. A little later, I loved the way she delivered the soft, intimate repetition of the Fanfare material (‘J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage’). Her singing of ‘Being Beauteous’ was wonderful; expressive, controlled intensity early on gave way to more animated delivery as the song progressed. She made the last song, ‘Départ’ into a rapt, beautiful conclusion to the cycle. “

Liz will be recording The Black Lake in February 2026.

On 6th June Liz performed as part of an opera gala, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Stoke-on-Trent becoming a city, live on BBC Radio 3. It featured Liz singing arias and duets by Mozart, Rossini and Puccini, including her first time singing the beautiful Si, mi chiamano Mimì. It is on BBC Sounds for a month at:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002d1kp

In May, Liz performed Mahler Symphony No 4 once again, with the wonderful Residentie Orkest and Jun Märkl in The Hague. The concerts were a huge success and will be broadcast on NPO Klassiek on 24th June.

https://www.npoklassiek.nl

Rather than give flowers at the end of the performance, the Residentie Orkest have commissioned beautiful linocut prints as gifts, as pictured.

After the success of Songs of Nadia Anjuman, which earned Richard Blackford nominations for both the Ivor Novello and Sky Arts Awards, Liz is delighted to be collaborating with this exciting composer again, this time on The Black Lake. Inspired by the great Welsh novel One Moonlit Night, Blackford’s soaring yet poignant work is for full orchestra, chorus, narrators, and soloists, tells the story of a boy’s passage to adulthood whilst growing up in a remote village in North Wales. Blackford’s music captures the beauty, sorrows, elements, and mysteries that surround this community who unite through music and song in times of sadness and joy. It has been commissioned by and will be premiered at The Three Choirs Festival, this year in Hereford. Liz will join the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in a programme which also includes Britten’s Les Illuminations.