James Conlon

James Conlon stands out as a conductor equally acclaimed across Europe and the United States for his command of both operatic and orchestral repertoire. He has held the post of music director at the Los Angeles Opera for many years.

Born on March 18, 1950, in Queens, New York, Conlon grew up with a father employed as a New York City government official and a mother who worked as a writer, in a family that showed no musical leanings. At age 11, after attending a performance of Verdi’s La traviata, he asked for music lessons, joined a children’s chorus, and entered New York’s High School of Music and Art. His choice to pursue conducting took shape during his time in the Aspen Music Festival conducting program. He enrolled at the Juilliard School in Manhattan in 1968, where he distinguished himself as a conducting student and led the Juilliard Orchestra on a European tour in 1970.

Returning to the United States, Conlon obtained a position as répétiteur at the 1971 Spoleto Festival in South Carolina. There he conducted Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, the opera he had long hoped would serve as his debut. Further recognition arrived the following year when soprano Maria Callas, visiting to give master classes, identified his promise and proposed him as a substitute for an ailing conductor in a Juilliard production.

In 1974 Conlon became the youngest conductor to lead the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in a subscription-series concert. His focus increasingly shifted toward opera, resulting in his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1976 with Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte—the first of roughly 250 performances he would conduct there—and his Covent Garden debut in 1979. That same year he accepted the directorship of Cincinnati’s May Festival, a role he retained until 2016, while also building a strong European presence that encompassed the Paris Opera, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in Italy, and the Rotterdam Philharmonic from 1983 to 1991. His first recording appeared in 1983 on the Erato label, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra accompanying pianist François-René Duchâble in Liszt’s piano concertos.

In 1988 Conlon was appointed general music director of the city of Cologne, Germany, a post that placed him in charge of both the Gürzenich Orchestra and the Cologne Opera; he remained until 2002, also appearing at the Lyric Opera of Chicago and serving at the Paris National Opera from 1995 to 2004, a longer tenure than any predecessor since 1939. Named music director of the Los Angeles Opera in 2006, he continued in that capacity into the early 2020s. In Los Angeles and elsewhere he has actively promoted works by composers affected by the Holocaust, among them Viktor Ullmann, Erwin Schulhoff, and Alexander von Zemlinsky. His catalog now exceeds 65 albums of operatic and orchestral music, many of which have received awards. In 2022 he led artists from the Colburn School in Los Angeles on the Delos release Shapeshifter: Music of Erwin Schulhoff.