John Shea
John Shea was born in Kingston-upon-Thames and began playing the piano aged 8 and the oboe at 11.
At 12 he won a Junior Exhibition to the Royal College of Music, and later went on to Cambridge University and the Royal Academy of Music; in 2001 he completed an M.Mus. at London University.
John has worked as a coach and accompanist for most of the major opera companies in Britain and Ireland, including Wexford Festival Opera as senior repetiteur from 1996 to 2006. Work abroad has included the Aix-en Provence and Montepulciano festivals, and coaching at an opera summer school in a Belgian chΓΆteau, rehearsing Handel's Orlando on a Tuscan hillside with eighteen sheep and a horse (and five singers), and four months at the Banff Centre in Canada, bathing in the sulphur pools and learning to play shuffleboard in between rehearsals for Birtwistle's Punch and Judy.
In 1994 he became an announcer on the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ World Service, and he joined Radio 3 two years later. His hobbies include swimming and sleeping.
