Jesús López-Cobos

Jesús López-Cobos first saw the light of day in Toro, Spain, and completed his higher education at the universities of Granada and Madrid, where he received a doctorate in philosophy from the latter in 1964. While still a student he directed a university chorus whose achievements prompted him to shift toward professional music training, culminating in a composition diploma from Madrid in 1966. He next worked on conducting technique with Franco Ferrara in Italy. Victory at the Besançon international conducting competition in 1968 was followed by further studies under Hans Swarowsky, after which he obtained his conducting degree from the Vienna Academy the following year. Also in 1969 he made his first appearance before a symphony orchestra in Prague and conducted opera for the initial time at La Fenice in Venice.

He first stood before the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1970 and later held the post of general music director there between 1981 and 1990. During those years he brought Wagner’s Ring cycle to Japan in 1987, marking the first complete presentation of the tetralogy in that nation. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s he also directed opera productions at Covent Garden, San Francisco Opera, the Vienna State Opera, La Scala, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York. From 1981 to 1986 he served as principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic, and between 1984 and 1989 he acted as principal conductor and artistic director of the Spanish National Orchestra.

Appointed music director of the Cincinnati Symphony in 1986, he assumed an additional directorship with the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra in 1990. His Cincinnati tenure generated an extensive series of Telarc recordings that included music by Respighi, Ravel, Richard Strauss, Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, Falla, Bizet, Franck, and Dukas. Critics particularly praised his account of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9, while his traversal of Albéniz’s Iberia in the Arbós and Surinach orchestrations remains the only complete version of that arrangement in the catalogue. His programming drew heavily on pieces from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the Lausanne ensemble he also recorded for Denon and Teldec.

Under his leadership the Cincinnati Symphony, ordinarily a resident orchestra, undertook several tours, among them a visit to Puerto Rico in 1998 and the ensemble’s first journey to the West Coast in 1992. His yearly Carnegie Hall concerts with the orchestra consistently sold out. In 1997 he conducted the group’s inaugural nationwide PBS telecast, which featured pianist Alicia de Larrocha. The Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music conferred an honorary doctorate in music upon him in 1996.

He became conductor emeritus of the Cincinnati Symphony in 2001 and concluded his affiliation with the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra in 2000. He retained the title of permanent conductor of the Orchestre Français des Jeunes, the Paris-based summer training program for young musicians. López-Cobos passed away in Berlin during March 2018 at the age of 78.