ANDY Morton, the director of this year’s Dorset Opera Festival production of L’Elisir d’Amore, was born and brought up in Sherborne, where his father was a teacher. It was as a teenager at Sherborne School he first came into contact with opera, joining the chorus of Dorset Opera then run by Patrick Shelley.

After studies, that included Spanish at Cambridge and singing at the Guildhall, Andy discovered his “adult” voice sat right on the cusp of the baritone and tenor range – a difficult place for a budding opera singer. He moved towards directing, where he spent the next decade assisting many productions, some of them famous, at English National Opera and other major houses. In 1996 he was invited to assist Francesca Zambello on Florencia en el Amazonas, a new hispanic opera by Daniel Catan, premiered in Houston and performed in Seattle and Los Angeles.

“But then I decided I must sing again,” says Andy, who returned to the UK after the huge success of the Marquez-inspired opera, and began auditioning again, this time in musical theatre “where the voice was most suitable.” After working for Cameron Mackintosh’s musicals in the West End, he joined the cast of Jerry Springer – The Opera, where he met mezzo-soprano Lore Lixenberg. It was via Lore that he was introduced to Dorset-based Opera Circus, and with that company worked on Differences in Demolitions, an opera set in Bosnia by Nigel Osborn, developed in Dorset and later performed in London, Edinburgh and in Mostar and Sarajevo.

During this period in his life, Andy decided to leave London and relocate to Bristol. The move was more radical than he anticipated. On his first night in his new city, his friends threw a party where he met a New Zealand-born defence engineer Kelly – his future wife. Kelly’s employers offered her a very good job in Australia, but she turned it down while Andy continued his singing career. Then in 2012 another job offer came up, and the family decided to move to Sydney, where Kelly “did the proper job” and Andy joined Opera Australia, first as an assistant director and later getting his own productions. He worked with David McVicar, reviving his productions and has been involved in seven “Sydney Harbour” productions, co-directing Carmen (the first opera he ever saw, as a child, in London) in 2017 and taking the reins of La Boheme in 2018. His first solo production in the Sydney Opera House was Bluebeard’s Castle in 2019.

Now back with Dorset Opera, long moved from the Big Schoolroom at Sherborne School where he first sang with them to Bryanston’s Coade Hall, he is excited to be taking a new look at Donizetti’s comic melodrama L’Elisir d’Amore. It gives him a chance to spend some of the summer with his parents, who still live in Sherborne, and to catch up with old friends.

Not only will audiences see DO favourite tenor Jay Broadhurst step up into the leading role of the lovelorn Nemorino, but the Korean soprano Haeran Hong sings Adina and the 6ft 8in Jonathan Eyers is the boastful Belcore. It may only have been 11 years since the last DOF production of L’Elisir, but this will be a very different version.

“When Rod (Kennedy) first talked to me about this, I started thinking how the very Italian story might work in rural Dorset – I’m a Dorset boy, after all,” he says. “Of course the first writer you think about is Thomas Hardy … and there are some similarities between Donizetti’s story and classic Hardy.

“But you’ll have to come along to Dorset Opera Festival to see how that works out.”

 

Performances of L’Elisir d’Amore are on Tuesday 21st, Friday 24th and Saturday 25th July at 7pm, and on Thursday 24th at 2pm.  The second Dorset Opera Festival 2026 production, Saint-Saens’ Samson et Dalila, is on 22nd and 23rd July at 7pm, and on Saturday 25th at 2pm.