OPERA and Song for an Autumn Evening sees two star turns team up for a Friends of Beetham Church fundraiser on Saturday, October 22 (7pm).

In aid of St Michael and All Angels (Beetham), internationally acclaimed soprano Jane Irwin, and pianist, Julia Lynch, share the spotlight in what promises to be a top class performance.

Jane studied singing at the Royal Northern College of Music as a mezzo.

As a concert and recital singer she has appeared regularly across the UK, Europe and America.

In 2002 she made her Carnegie Hall debut with the Pittsburgh Symphony under Mariss Jansons. She has sung for the BBC Proms, at the Edinburgh International Festival, the Berlin Festival, the Concertgebouw and the Musikverein. She has worked with numerous world-renowned orchestras, and on the home front has worked with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the Hallé Orchestra, and with conductors including Myung Whun Chung, Sir Simon Rattle, Semyon Bychkov, Ivor Bolton, and Andrew Davis.

She has given recitals at the Châtelet, Paris, London, Edinburgh, Geneva, Aix-en-Provence and Japan.

Jane recently moved into the soprano repertoire, where she has sung Britten’s War Requiem, Marie in Fragments from Wozzeck, in Tippett’s King Priam at the Brighton Festival, and many more.

Her latest engagements include Verdi Requiem with Vladimir Jurowski at the Royal Festival Hall, concerts with Manchester Camerata, Northern Sinfonia, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, San Diego Orchestra, Finnish Radio Symphony, Real Filharmonia de Galicia, Orchestre National de Lyon and Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra. Jane sang the role of Miss Jessel in a recent performance of Turn of the Screw at Snape Maltings. She performed her first Isolde for Regensburg opera in 2015 and the Foreign Princess in Saarbrucken this year.

Born in Dublin, but brought up in Aberdeen, Julia began playing piano at the age of four, studying later with Denis Matthews and David Parkhouse at the North East of Scotland Music School.

She won a scholarship to Glasgow's renowned Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (now Royal Scottish Conservatoire) where she studied piano and harpsichord, and won every available prize for piano solo, accompaniment and chamber music; she is now staff accompanist at the conservatoire.

Julia is one of the UK's most sought after accompanists and has performed across the world, with recitals in London, Tokyo and Geneva as well as appearances at the Proms, the Edinburgh Festival and Cardiff Singer of the World. She appears as orchestra pianist with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and broadcasts and records regularly.

She is music assistant to Eberhard Friedrich at the Bayreuther Festspiele in Germany, and along with distinguished names as Malcolm Martineau and Sir Thomas Allen, works with the eminent Samling Foundation, furthering the talents of a new generation of singers.

A terrific opportunity to hear two class acts make music together.

Tickets are available on 015395-62559 or from Beetham Village Store.