Jonathan Lyness

Conductor

Jonathan is Associate Conductor of Longborough Festival Opera and Music Director of Opera Project. He will take up a new appointment as Music Director of Mid Wales Opera in April 2017.

He was born in London and read music at Bristol University where he won both university undergraduate and British Academy postgraduate arts scholarships. He later studied conducting with George Hurst. He co-founded Opera Project in 1993 with whom he has conducted much of the standard repertoire, ranging from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Pergolesi’s La Serva Padrona to such twentieth century works as Walton’s The Bear, Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti, Ravel’s L’Heure Espagnole, Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale and Britten’s three chamber operas The Turn of the Screw, The Beggar’s Opera and Albert Herring.

For Longborough Festival Opera he has recently conducted A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Katya Kabanová, The Cunning Little Vixen, Tosca, The Barber of Seville, La bohème, Falstaff, Madama Butterfly and Eugene Onegin. He has conducted regularly at West Green House Opera since 2000 where recent productions include Ariadne auf Naxos, The Marriage of Figaro, The Tales of Hoffmann, Lehar’s The Merry Widow, Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi and Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music.

In addition to conducting Jonathan has created some twenty reduced orchestrations of operas that are now performed widely across Europe, Asia and the USA.