James Conlon
| James Conlon | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Background information | |
| Born |
March 18, 1950 New York City, New York, United States |
| Genres | Classical |
| Occupation(s) | Conductor |
James Conlon (born March 18, 1950) 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. He was the long serving director of the two week Cincinnati May Festival from 1979 through 2016. From 2005 to 2015, he was music director at the Ravinia Festival, the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He is known for his efforts in reviving music by composers suppressed during the Nazi regime.
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. 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 ). 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.
He entered the Fiorello H. La Guardia High School of Music & Art at the age of fifteen and at eighteen he was accepted into the Aspen Music Festival and School conducting program, and in September, 1968 he entered The Juilliard School of music. In 1970, the Juilliard Orchestra took an educational tour to Europe and he was invited to Spoleto the next year as an assistant doing work as a répétiteur, coach and chorus conductor. During that time, 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.
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