Our story

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Jimmy & Rosalia is an opera written by Nick Veltmeyer.  This piece gathers two streams of early music: baroque and folk. Jimmy & Rosalia tells the timeless love story of Jimmy, a poor Acadian shepherd, and Rosalia, an English immigrant from a wealthy family. The two meet and enter a journey of love and pain, one that rattles the social order. Songs from the Nova Scotian folk collection of Helen Creighton, Canada's First Lady of Folklore, are cross pollinated with Handel's Acis and Galatea to create the work.  

 This project aims to bring a larger visibility to traditional Canadian oral culture while creating new and relevant art of the highest quality.  

Banff Residency 2020

In February, four core members of the Aureas Voces team travelled to Banff Centre of Arts & Creativity to workshop the opera Jimmy and Rosalia, for two weeks in the program Concert in the 21st Century.

Aureas Voces was founded in 2018 by Nick Veltmeyer in Halifax, Nova Scotia, as a guided collaboration of exceptional young local talent. Our first year included 4 unique programmes, 8 concerts and 20 talented performers. 

Our first four programmes in 2018  were Lamentations, featuring Tallis' Lamentations of Jeremiah and a modern premiere of John Donne's translation of the lamentations by Henry Ford ; "Bach's Organ Mass" ; "The Tudor Rose" (Tudor Music) . In this first year Aureas Voces built a community and produced a lot of live classical music. 

In 2019 Aureas Voces performed An Ocean Appart, a stunning arrangements of Nova Scotian folk songs from the Helen Creighton Collection and works from celebrated English composer Henry Purcell (1659-1695) tell the journey across oceans of young love and the passions of distance.  Nick Veltmeyer congregates emerging artists from Halifax, Toronto,  Montreal and New York for this unique project.

In 2020 the ensemble started a new adventure, creating a brand new early music opera : Jimmy and Rosalia.