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James Conlon
Born	(1950-03-18) March 18, 1950 (age 68) New York City, United States
Occupation	Conductor
Website	JamesConlon.com

James Conlon (born March 18, 1950)^[1] is an American conductor of opera, and symphonic and choral works. He is Music Director of Los Angeles Opera and Principal Conductor of the Italian RAI National Symphony Orchestra. From 1979 to 2016, he was Music Director of the two-week Cincinnati May Festival, and his tenure remains the longest music directorship in the festival's history.^[2] From 2005 to 2015, he was Music Director at the Ravinia Festival, the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.^[3] He has also achieved recognition for bringing greater attention to the music of composers oppressed by the Nazi regime.^[4]

Early years

Conlon grew up in a family of five children on Cherry Street in Douglaston, Queens, New York City. His mother, Angeline L. Conlon, was a freelance writer. His father was an assistant to the New York City Commissioner of Labor in the Robert F. Wagner administration.^[5] His siblings were not musically inclined, nor were his parents. When he was eleven, he went to a production of La traviata by an amateur company founded by the mother of a friend (Edith Mugdan, the mother of the young Conlon's best friend, Walter Mugdan, and the founder of the North Shore Opera).^[6] He asked for music lessons and became a treble (boy soprano) in a children's chorus in an opera company in Queens. He dreamed about being a tenor, then a baritone, and even wanted to sing the role of Carmen at one point. Finally it dawned on him that the only way to do everything in opera was to become an operatic conductor.^[7]

Education

From 1965 to 1968, Conlon studied at New York's High School of Music & Art. After graduating, he studied conducting during the summer at the Aspen Music Festival and School and enrolled at the Juilliard School in the fall. In 1970, the Juilliard Orchestra took an educational tour to Europe, and he was invited to the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto the next year to work as a répétiteur, coach and chorus conductor. During that time at the festival, he conducted one performance of Boris Godunov. He recalled that he had fallen in love with this opera at a young age and had dreamed that it would be the first opera he would conduct.^[7]

In 1972, Conlon conducted a Juilliard production of La bohème, directed by Michael Cacoyannis, after conductor Thomas Schippers suddenly pulled out. At the time, Maria Callas was doing a series of master classes at Juilliard and heard Conlon in rehearsal. She suggested to Juilliard's president, Peter Mennin, that Conlon should step in to conduct.^[8]

Career

In 1974, at the invitation of Pierre Boulez, Conlon became the youngest conductor engaged for the New York Philharmonic's subscription series. Since then, he has appeared with virtually every major North American and European orchestra, including all of the Big Five.

He has also appeared with many of the world's major opera companies. In 1976, he made his Metropolitan Opera debut conducting The Magic Flute, and over the next 30 years, he conducted more than 250 performances at the Met, including works from the Italian, German, French, Russian and Czech repertoires. He also debuted in the UK in 1976, conducting at the Scottish Opera, and three years later conducted for the first time at the Royal Opera House-Covent Garden. He has also conducted at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Teatro alla Scala (Milan), Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, Teatro Real (Madrid) and the Vienna State Opera, among other opera companies, houses, and festivals.

Conlon has held several major European posts, including Principal Conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic (1983–1991), General Music Director of the City of Cologne, Germany (1989–2002),^[9] where he simultaneously led the Gürzenich Orchestra and Cologne Opera, and Principal Conductor of the Paris Opera (1995–2004), where his tenure was the longest of any conductor there since 1939. His leadership is associated with an increase in artistic standards, overall productivity and attendance, which, in an era of diminishing audiences, has increased exponentially in the past decade.^{[citation needed]} In 2015, he was named Principal Conductor of the Italian RAI National Symphony Orchestra, making him the first American to hold this position since the orchestra was founded.

U.S. directorships

Conlon has been Music Director of Los Angeles Opera since the 2006–07 season. His work there has included a series called Recovered Voices, a multi-year project presenting operas by composers oppressed by the Nazi regime. The series included a double-bill of Alexander von Zemlinsky's The Dwarf (Der Zwerg) and Viktor Ullmann's The Broken Jug (Der zerbrochene Krug), as well as operas by Franz Schreker and Walter Braunfels, among other composers. In an effort to establish a Wagnerian tradition in Los Angeles, Conlon has thus far conducted seven of Wagner's operas at LA Opera, including the LA premiere performances of Der Ring des Nibelungen during the 2008–09 season. In 2013, Conlon, whose lifelong fascination with Benjamin Britten was reflected in a personal three-year performance cycle of the composer's works in America and Europe, spearheaded Britten 100/LA: A Celebration, a countywide collaboration featuring performances, conferences and exhibitions.^[10]

Conlon was Music Director of the Ravinia Festival, the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 2005 to 2015. He was Music Director of the two-week Cincinnati May Festival from 1979 to 2016, providing artistic leadership for more May Festivals than any other music director in the festival's history and holding a place among the longest-tenured music directors of any major classical music institution in the United States.

Pedagogy

In 2008, Conlon completed a two-year artist residency at his alma mater, the Juilliard School. During the residency, Conlon worked with the school's young artists in its three divisions – dance, drama, music – in an educational project meant to promote growth and historical curiosity in students and audience members alike. The cross-genre project consisted of performances, symposia, master classes and coaching. In addition to study and performance of the lesser-known repertoire of composers affected by the rise of Nazism and the events of World War II (see section "Composers from the Holocaust era"), Conlon moderated symposia and spoke about the role of the artist in current times.

Composers from the Holocaust era

In an effort to call greater public attention to composers whose lives and work were affected by Nazi cultural policies and the Holocaust, Conlon has devoted himself to extensive programming of this music in North America and Europe. This includes works by such composers as Alexander von Zemlinsky, Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, Kurt Weill, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Erwin Schulhoff, and Ernst Krenek. In addition to Recovered Voices at Los Angeles Opera, each summer when he was Music Director of the Ravinia Festival, Conlon presented a different composer from this group with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. A production of Ullmann's Der Kaiser von Atlantis, conceived by Conlon, has traveled extensively since its first showing in New York. Produced in cooperation with the Juilliard School, it has since been reprised at the Spoleto Festival in Italy (Festival dei Due Mondi), the Ravinia Festival, in cooperation with the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, the Houston Grand Opera and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where it was performed in 2004 at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple.

Mentorship

Conlon is committed to working with young pre-professional musicians and, in addition to his continual work with Juilliard ensembles, has devoted his time to teaching at the Aspen Music Festival and School and Tanglewood Music Center. He is actively involved in the Ravinia Festival's Steans Institute for Young Artists as well as Ravinia's model community outreach and education programs, and plans to help lead and expand educational projects during his tenure at Los Angeles Opera. Conlon has been active with the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition since 1997, where he not only conducts the final round of the competition, but also initiated a program through which he leads master classes and coaches finalists. His work in several Cliburn competitions was taped and aired in a special series on PBS, the most recent of which debuted in spring 2006, and the Final Round concerts comprising the concerti and recital performances, rehearsals, symposia including "A Talk with James Conlon," and the awards ceremony, were webcast live during the 2009 competition. He is also featured in the final round section of the 2001 Van Cliburn Competition documentary film The Cliburn: Playing on the Edge.

Recordings

Conlon has recorded extensively for the EMI, Erato, Capriccio and Sony Classical labels. He made his first recording for Telarc of the world premiere of Franz Liszt's St. Stanislaus oratorio, released in January 2004. A champion of the works of Alexander Zemlinsky, he has made nine recordings of the composer's operas and orchestral works with the Gürzenich Orchestra-Cologne Philharmonic for EMI. Several of these recordings individually have earned prestigious international awards, and in October 2002, the series was awarded the 2002 ECHO Klassik Award for "Editorial Achievement of the Year." Conlon has also inaugurated a new series of 20th-century works with Capriccio, including a recording of works by Erwin Schulhoff with the Bayerischer Rundfunk, and a CD/DVD of the works of Viktor Ullmann with the Gürzenich Orchestra, which won the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik (German Record Critics Award for Excellence). His other Capriccio recordings include the works of Karl Amadeus Hartmann and Dmitri Shostakovich with violinist Vladimir Spivakov and the Gürzenich Orchestra.

Television

PBS aired a series of six shows hosted by Conlon entitled Encore! With James Conlon during the spring of 2006, part of an ongoing series of documentaries on his work with the finalists of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, which have also included Playing on the Edge and Hearing Ear to Ear with James Conlon. Among his other television appearances on PBS are Concerto, six half-hour shows hosted by Conlon, and Cincinnati May Festival 2000.

Film

Conlon conducted the orchestra for Kenneth Branagh's The Magic Flute (2006), a film version of Mozart's opera, sung in English and set here during World War I.

Awards

• 
  Grand Prix du Disque (France), for EMI recording of Zemlinsky: The Dwarf, 1997


• In 1999, Conlon received the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music Zemlinsky Prize, awarded only once before, for his efforts in bringing the composer's music to international attention.


• He was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Music degree by the Juilliard School in 2004, an honorary Doctor of Arts honoris causa by Chapman University in 2009 and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Brandeis University in 2009.


• In 2005, Conlon received one of five annual Opera News Awards given for the first time in recognition of distinguished contributions from leading figures in the world of opera.


• He has been honored by The New York Public Library as a "Library Lion", an annual award given to individuals in recognition of their contributions through their work.


• Conlon was named an Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 1996, and in September 2004 he was promoted to Commander—the highest honor awarded by the Ministry of Culture in France. In September 2002, Conlon received France's highest distinction from the President of the French Republic, Jacques Chirac—the Légion d'Honneur.


• Conlon was honored by the Anti-Defamation League for his work championing composers silenced by the Third Reich. Conlon received the League's Crystal Globe Award at the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park near Chicago on August 12, 2007.^[11]
  


• Conlon received the Medal of the American Liszt Society in recognition of his distinctive performances of the composer's works.


• He received Italy's Premio Galileo 2000 Award for his significant contribution to music, art and peace in Florence in 2008


• Conlon received the Music Institute of Chicago's Dushkin Award in recognition of his artistry and passion as a performer, educator, and mentor in 2009


• Conlon's rendition of Kurt Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny won a 2009 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording. The recording was made with Los Angeles Opera.


• Conlon was inducted in 2009 into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame.


• In 2016, Conlon was honored with the title of Commendatore Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana (Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic) by the President of the Italian Republic.^[12]
  


• Conlon's world premiere recording of John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles with Los Angeles Opera won the 2017 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording and Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, Classical.

Family

Conlon married Jennifer Ringo, a soprano and vocal coach, on January 9, 1987, at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. She is a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music and the University of Iowa. They have two daughters, Luisa, who was named for the Verdi opera Luisa Miller, and Emma. Luisa acted in the 1998 Merchant-Ivory film, A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries.

Selected discography

• 
  Berlioz: Béatrice et Bénédict, Erato Disques.


• 
  John Corigliano - The Ghosts of Versailles. James Conlon, Patricia Racette, Christopher Maltman, Kristinn Sigmundsson, Joshua Guerrero, Los Angeles Opera. PENTATONE PTC 5186538 (2016)


• 
  Liszt: Faust Symphony, Erato Disques.


• 
  Mendelssohn: Elijah, EMI Classics.


• 
  Puccini: La Bohème, Erato/Red Seal, 1998.


• 
  Puccini's Heroines: The Power of Love, Warner, 2002.


• 
  Shostakovich: Violin Concerto no. 1; Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk Suite, Capriccio, 2002.


• Bo Skovhus: Arias, Sony Classical, 1998.


• 
  Stravinsky: Le Rossignol, EMI, 1999.


• 
  Zemlinsky: Eine florentinische Tragödie, EMI Classics, 1997.


• 
  Zemlinsky: The Dwarf, EMI, 1997.


• Zemlinsky: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2, Angel, 1998.


• Zemlinsky: Cymbeline Suite/Ein Tanzpoem/Frühlingsbegräbnis, EMI, 2001.


• Zemlinsky: Choral and Orchestral Works, EMI, 2002.


• 
  Amore II: Great Italian Love Arias, Sony Classical, 2000.

Videography

References

• 
  Jim Svejda. The Record Shelf Guide to the Classical Repertoire (1990)
  ISBN 1-55958-051-8
  

External links

• Official website


• 
  Interview with James Conlon, January 26, 1988