Gyula Nagy was born in Veszprém, where he started learning to play the trombone as a child with teacher Miklós Szuromi. Later he took up singing as well, his first teacher was Károly Ötvös. After grammar school, he studied singing with Mária Fekete at the Bartók Béla Conservatory in Budapest. In 2007, he gained his MA degrees at the University of Pannonia in English Literature and Linguistics, as well as Theatre Studies. He played in many rock and ska-punk bands as a singer and as a trombonist. He went on to study singing at the Royal Irish Academy of Music with teacher Philip O’Reilly, where he completed his degree in 2014. He then trained at the National Opera Studio in London and he was a member of the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden (2016-2018). He has been a freelancer since 2018.
Gyula appeared as Tarquinius (Britten: The Rape of Lucretia, Irish Youth Opera 2014), Silvio (Leoncavallo: Pagliacci, Welsh National Opera 2016), Ulisse (Monteverdi: Il ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria, Opera Collective Ireland 2018), the Gipsy (Mussorgsky: The Fair at Sorochyntsi, Komische Oper Berlin 2019), Schaunard (Puccini: La bohéme, Royal Opera House Covent Garden 2018, 2020), Pizarro (Beethoven: Fidelio, Lyric Opera Dublin 2020) and as Escamillo (Bizet: Carmen, Opera North 2021-22).
Recently, he sang Lescaut in Puccini’s Manon Lescaut (Dorset Opera Festival 2022), Sharpless in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (Royal Opera house Covent Garden 2022), he appeared in the title roles in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (Irish National Opera 2022) and in Verdi’s Rigoletto (Fundacion Excelentia, Madrid 2022), as Alfio/Tonio in the concert performance of Cavalleria Rusticana/Pagliacci (Cambridge Philharmonic 2023), as Urok in Paderewski’s Manru (Opéra National de Lorraine 2023) and as Valentin in Gounod’s Faust (Irish National Opera 2023).
In 2024-25, he appears as Leicester/Beefeater in The Critic by Stanford for Wexford Festival Opera, as Don Magnifico in Rossini’s La Cenerentola for Opéra National de Lorraine/Théâtre de Caen/Opéra de Reims/Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg and as the baritone soloist for the staged performance version of Carmina Burana for the Hungarian State Opera.
As a concert performer in Ireland and in the UK, Gyula has worked with many orchestras and ensembles, including the Irish Baroque Orchestra, the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and the Cambridge Philharmonic. In 2023, he had the opportunity to perform in Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 with the Hungarian State Opera in his native town of Veszprém, as part of the European Capital of Culture programmes. Gyula regularly collaborates with organist Judit Máté, (Dun Laoghaire Organ Concerts, Waterford International Organ Festival, Galway Cathedral Recitals, Martinus Organ Festival Szombathely), most recently they performed organ-baritone programmes commemorating the 100th anniversary of the death of Charles Villiers Stanford.
