Biography

Equally well known in Europe and the U.S., James Conlon excels as an operatic and orchestral conductor. He is the longtime music director of the Los Angeles Opera. Conlon was born in Queens, New York, on March 18, 1950. His father was a New York City government official, and his mother was a writer; no one in the family had any musical tendencies. When Conlon was 11, he saw a production of Verdi's La traviata and requested music lessons. He joined a children's chorus and enrolled at New York's High School of Music and Art. Conlon settled on conducting after a stint at the Aspen Music Festival conducting program. He matriculated at Juilliard School in Manhattan in 1968 and flourished there as a conducting student, leading the Juilliard Orchestra on a European tour in 1970. Back in the U.S., Conlon landed a post at the 1971 Spoleto Festival in South Carolina as a répétiteur. During the festival, he conducted a performance of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, the opera he had dreamed would mark his debut. Another boost to the young conductor's career came the following year, when soprano Maria Callas, at the school to give master classes, noticed Conlon's talents and suggested him as a replacement for an ailing conductor in a Juilliard production. In 1974, Conlon became the youngest conductor ever to lead the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in a subscription series concert. His interests increasingly turned toward opera, and he made his debuts at the Metropolitan Opera in 1976 (in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, the first of some 250 performances he would conduct there) and at London's Covent Garden in 1979. That year, he accepted a post as director of Cincinnati's May Festival, remaining in that position through 2016, but he was increasingly active in Europe as well, conducting the Paris Opera, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in Italy, and from 1983 to 1991, the Rotterdam Philharmonic. In 1983, he made his recording debut on the Erato label, leading the London Philharmonic Orchestra on a recording of Liszt's piano concertos by François-René Duchâble. In 1988, Conlon became the general music director of the city of Cologne, Germany, which involved the music directorships of both the Gürzenich Orchestra and Cologne Opera. He held that position until 2002, also conducting at the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Paris National Opera during this period; he held his Paris post from 1995 until 2004, longer than any of his predecessors since 1939. In 2006, Conlon was named the music director of the Los Angeles Opera; he continued to hold that position as of the early 2020s. There and elsewhere, he has championed the works of composers affected by the Holocaust, including Viktor Ullmann, Erwin Schulhoff, and Alexander von Zemlinsky. Conlon's recording catalog includes more than 65 albums featuring him as conductor in both operatic and orchestral music, and these have won many awards. In 2022, he conducted artists from the Colburn School in Los Angeles in the Delos release Shapeshifter: Music of Erwin Schulhoff. ~ James Manheim, Rovi