English Pocket Opera Company (EPOC) is an opera company with a difference: it produces opera for, by, and with children and young people.
In 2001, with the help of funding from, amongst others, Arts Council England, the Peter Moores Foundation and English National Opera Baylis, the company established its first programme of education work offering inspirational, innovative and accessible and education programmes to schools and communities.
Since 2001, EPOC has worked with close to half a million children in over 500 schools from 20 English boroughs and counties.
But the history of EPOC starts in 1993 when the forerunner of EPOC, Camberwell Pocket Opera, was formed as an ensemble company to perform and tour to small and medium-scale opera productions to a wide audience.
As a performing company, EPOC specialised in works in the English language, re-interpreting classic operas in an intimate format. It attracted artists, singers and partners of the highest calibre, and performed regularly at prestigious festivals including Bermuda, Edinburgh, Covent Garden, Longborough and Ryedale.
The company received much praise for its imaginative stagings and innovative choice of repertoire, which included: the first ever presentation of the three most famous operas based on Beaumarchais’ Figaro trilogy - The Barber of Seville (Rossini), The Marriage of Figaro (Mozart) and the first British performance of La Mère Coupable (Darius Milhaud). The company also presented a two-piano version of Tristan and Isolde, the British première performances of Massenet’s Cléopâtre and the first-ever UK staging of Haydn’s The Desert Island (L’isola disabitata).
Having established itself as an educational opera company, in 2006, EPOC took over the management of Children’s Music Workshop and for a while the two companies were known collectively as Music Platform.
In 2010 the company became EPOC once more.
