
Welcome to the website for vocal coach, repetiteur and accompanist
Lesley-Anne Sammons
Regarded as one of the UK’s most experienced and successful vocal coaches, Lesley-Anne’s consummate musicianship mixed with her effective and encouraging coaching style makes her the popular choice for singers and conductors across the globe.
Praise for Lesley Anne’s exciting new arrangement of La Calisto
Barefoot Band @ Longborough Opera 2019

photo credit: Matthew Williams-Ellis
A Punky Take On A Baroque Masterpiece
“In the pit Lesley Anne Sammons’s excellent Barefoot Band matched what was happening on stage with hollowed-out accompaniments that were more 1920s Berlin than 17th-century Venice. Pizzicato-bass jazz riffs, soulful accordion decorations, scrunchy harmonies, lots of percussion and some full-blown grunge effects: it shouldn’t have worked with Cavalli’s elegant baroque melodies, but it did.”
Matthew Williams Ellis – The Times

photo credit: Matthew Williams-Ellis
Bawdy Re-telling Of A Classical Myth
“The musical account is at least as lively as the choreography, the score being literally jazzed up in a notable number of passages – particularly to underline the louche characters of Jupiter and Mercury. Cavalli’s typically sparse, continuo-led music (by standards of later opera, that is) gives The Barefoot Band and Lesley Anne Sammons the freedom to elaborate the basic score with added drums, a clarinet, keyboard (in addition to the standard harpsichord), and an electronic guitar, to provide more colour and weighty accompaniment ….. on the whole, the two styles blend convincingly, just as the contemporary staging interweaves myth and Baroque opera.”
Curtis Rogers – Classical Source

photo credit: Matthew Williams-Ellis
Captivating Realisation Of A Baroque Opera
“Cavalli’s music turns on a ha’penny, and in Mathilde Lopez’s production, conducted and (brilliantly) arranged by Lesley Anne Sammons, high-baroque elegance can metamorphose at any moment into cocktail jazz, urban funk or the raunchiest of tangos……. Baroque purists would have squealed the house down: the clarinet, accordion, recorders and bass guitar of Sammons’s Barefoot Band could hardly have been less authentic. Yet their freewheeling, fantastical reinvention of Cavalli’s score was a triumph, presenting this flamboyant omnisexual drama of lust, jealousy, pleasure and pain as the musically sumptuous, utterly modern entertainment that Cavalli surely intended….I don’t know when I last saw a less prissy, more captivating realisation of a baroque opera, and in a fairer universe, this production would become an instant classic. Fingers crossed for a revival. “
Richard Bratbury – Midlands Music Making – Birmingham Post
