David Jones
was born in Ireland and studied at Trinity College Dublin, the
Royal Northern College of Music, 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 (Scottish Opera), Madam
Butterfly (English National Opera), Die Zauberflöte and Carmen
(Welsh National Opera), Manon Lescaut (Opera North), Haydn’s Il
Mondo della Luna and Carmen (Opera Zuid in productions directed by
Calixto Bieito), and Die Zauberflöte (Lucerne). In Ireland he has
conducted Le Nozze di Figaro, Madama Butterfly, La Traviata and La
Boheme for Lyric Opera Dublin, Stanislaw Moniuszko’s Straszny Dwor
at the Wexford Festival and the Irish premiere of Mark Anthony
Turnage’s The Silver Tassie for Opera Ireland. He also conducted
Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice with the Balthasar-Neumann-Ensemble at
the Palais Garnier in Paris.
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, with the BBC Singers and The
Endymion Ensemble as part of the South Bank Centre’s 2002 Kurtág
Festival, and in 2006 with the Netherlands Radio Choir in the
Concertgebouw, Amsterdam.
Other world premieres include Rihm’s Astralis with the
Berlin Rundfunkchor and Kevin O’Connell’s The Besieged City with
the Ulster Orchestra. Subsequent Edinburgh Festival
performances have included Rossini's Petite messe solenelle and
John Adams’s Harmonium with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and
Edinburgh Festival Chorus, Feldman's Rothko Chapel with Lawrence
Power and the RSAMD Chamber Choir, Vaughan Williams Serenade to
Music and Dona Nobis Pacem with the Scottish Chamber
Orchestra.
David has also appeared with major orchestras in the UK and
Europe including the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, Hallé, Ulster
Orchestra, the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra 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 has also conducted
the SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart and the MDR RundfunkChor. He
recently recorded a CD of works by Bill Whelan with the Irish
Chamber Orchestra.