About

Ophelia Amar is a French-British musician born in France, who is both a lover of the Arts and passionate about History. She is an active performer both in France and in London, having recently participated as a solo-performer in the “Bach the European” series with Rachel Podger, and as a recitalist for the concert series curated by the Eric Thompson Trust at Saint-Mary-le-Bow church. She also currently plays for services at Notre-Dame-de-France church in Leicester Square and Christ Church in Spitalfields.

Ophelia is interested in repertoires from all eras and wants to shed light on forgotten composers. In 2018, as a postgraduate enrolled in the Franco-German Master in History, offered jointly by Panthéon-Sorbonne University and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, she completed a dissertation on the post-war contemporary music festival musica viva, founded by composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann in October 1945 to promote the works that had been forbidden under Nazi rule (https://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-01916554/document). She has also worked on several projects aiming at promoting works by women composers: in 2019 she participated in a business project to set up a French national resource centre (Présence compositrices), initiated and founded by Claire Bodin, and in 2021, with fellow organists, she recorded pieces by Joséphine Boulay for a CD (Singulièrement Plurielles) released in June of the same year.

Ophelia graduated in History, Political Sciences, and Musicology and studied contemporary History and Cultural management at a postgraduate level in respectively Panthéon-Sorbonne University and HEC Paris Business School. She started the organ in 2016 with Éric Lebrun and obtained her diploma at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Saint-Maur-des-Fossés near Paris after a complete piano course with Christine Fonlupt at the same conservatoire. Before moving to the UK, she was a church organist in Créteil and at the Frederikskirken – the Danish Church in Paris. She is currently studying organ performance with David Titterington and choral conducting with Patrick Russill at the Royal Academy of Music in London, with support from the ABRSM and the Nicholas Danby Trust.