National Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company music directors for the company. In 2014, the festival registered the company with Companies House as the National Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company. The company's performances are accompanied by the festival's National Festival Orchestra. It generally presents four productions each year at the festival, and the festival sells videos of most of its productions. In 2018, in connection with the 25th anniversary of the International G&S Festival, the company is presenting six productions in Harrogate, Buxton and on tour. Uniquely among professional companies in Britain, other than D'Oyly Carte, the National Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company has presented all 13
Gilbert and Sullivan of the opera. In 1880, Sullivan's cantata "The Martyr of Antioch" premiered at the Leeds Triennial Music Festival, with a libretto modified by Gilbert from an 1822 epic poem by Henry Hart Milman concerning the 3rd century martyrdom of St. Margaret of Antioch. Sullivan became the conductor of the Leeds festival beginning in 1880 and conducted the performance. The Carl Rosa Opera Company staged the cantata as an opera in 1898. "Patience" (1881) satirised the aesthetic movement in general and its colourful poets in particular, combining aspects of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, James McNeill Whistler and