David Jones - conductor
David Jones was born in Ireland and studied at Trinity College Dublin, the Royal Northern College of Music Manchester and with Seiji Ozawa and Leonard Bernstein at the Tanglewood Music Center.
David Jones’s extensive operatic repertoire includes Il Trovatore, Die Fledermaus, Samson et Dalila, Hansel and Gretel, La Belle Hélène, Iolanthe, Tosca and La Traviata for Scottish Opera, Haydn’s Il Mondo della Luna and Carmen for Opera Zuid in productions directed by Calixto Bieito, Die Zauberflöte in Lucerne, Hansel and Gretel, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly for Lyric Opera Dublin and Stanislaw Moniuszko’s Straszny Dwor at the Wexford Festival. He made his debuts with Welsh National Opera conducting performances of Die Zauberflöte and with Opera Ireland in the Irish premiere of Mark Anthony Turnage’s The Silver Tassie. He recently returned to WNO to conduct performances of Carmen, made his debut with Opera North conducting Manon Lescaut, conducted Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice with the Balthasar-Neumann-Ensemble at the Palais Garnier in Paris and La Bohéme for Lyric Opera Dublin
David Jones made his Edinburgh Festival debut in 1996 conducting the world première of the complete version of Kurtág Songs of Despair and Sorrow. The performance was repeated at the Festival d’Automne in Paris and in the 1997 Edinburgh and Salzburg Festivals. He has subsequently performed the work with the Berlin Rundfunkchor and Sharoun Ensemble and the BBC Singers and The Endymion Ensemble as part of the South Bank Centre’s 2002 Kurtág Festival. He has conducted a number of world premieres including Rihm’s Astralis with the Berlin Rundfunkchor and Kevin O’Connell’s The Besieged City with the Ulster Orchestra. Since 1996 he has been a regular guest conductor at the Edinburgh International Festival including performances of Rossini's Petite messe solenelle and John Adams’s Harmonium with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Edinburgh Festival Chorus and in the 2004 Festival Feldman's Rothko Chapel with Lawrence Power and the RSAMD Chamber Choir. .
He has also appeared with major orchestras in the UK and Europe including the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland and the Irish Chamber Orchestra. He conducted the Sinfonie Orchester Wuppertal in performances of Bach’s St.Matthew Passion, the orchestra of Opera de Nancy in a programme of Bach and Beethoven, the Athens Symphony Orchestra and Yuri Bashmet performing Kanceli’s Styx, a Gershwin programme with the Hannover Radio Symphony Orchestra on a successful tour of Germany and concerts in the UK with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Northern Sinfonia. He recently recorded a CD of works by Bill Whelan with the Irish Chamber Orchestra.
In 2006 he conducted Kurtág’s Songs of Despair and Sorrow with the Netherlands Radio Choir in the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam and made his debut with English National Opera conducting Madam Butterfly. Later that year he conducted Vaughan Williams Serenade to Music and Dona Nobis Pacem with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra at the Edinburgh Festival, and in April 2007 he conducted the same programme in Valencia. He recently conducted performances of La Traviata with Lyric Opera Dublin, and returned to ENO for Madam Butterfly.
He was recently appointed Conductor in Residence at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama