Baritone Oskar McCarthy’s operatic roles include Giorgio/The Gondoliers and Quince (cover)/A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Scottish Opera); Leporello/Don Giovanni, Don Alfonso/Così fan tutte and Dulcamara/L’elisir d’amore (Waterperry Opera Festival); Kromow/The Merry Widow (Opera Bohemia); and The Captain/Siren Song (Shadwell Opera). He has performed Edmund in Shakespeare’s King Lear at The Grange Festival (a ‘standout performance’, The Times), Robert Schumann in Re: Sound Music Theatre’s acclaimed play-with-music Duet at the Oxford Lieder Festival and Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King with Red Note Ensemble.
Oskar curates experimental collaborative performances in non-traditional spaces. He recently performed six improvised ten-minute operatic monologues with composer Zeo Fawcett, streamed live from a converted shipping container in Glasgow to equivalent sites in Gaza, Mali and Uganda, as part of the RCS’ tie-in with COP26. Previously he worked with composer Rufus Elliot to create ‘the case against...’, a pair of six-hour durational installations for voice and electronics which ran non-stop 12-6pm on consecutive days.
Oskar is a graduate of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Opera School and Cambridge University. He has studied Lecoq technique, fooling, improvisation, and mime at the International School of Dramatic Corporeal Mime in Paris.