David Lloyd–Jones began his professional career in 1959 on the music staff of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and soon became much in demand as a freelance conductor for orchestral and choral concerts, opera, BBC broadcasts and TV studio opera productions. He has appeared at the Royal Opera House (Boris Godunov with both Christoff and Ghaiurov), Welsh National Opera, Scottish Opera and the Wexford, Cheltenham, Edinburgh and Leeds Festivals, and with the major British orchestras.
In 1972 he was appointed Assistant Music Director at English National Opera, and during his time there conducted an extensive repertory which included, in addition to all the standard operas, Die Meistersinger, Katya Kabanova, and the British stage premiere of Prokofiev’s War and Peace.
In 1978, at the invitation of the Arts Council of Great Britain, he founded a new full-time opera company, Opera North, with its own orchestra, the English Northern Philharmonia, of which he became Artistic Director and Principal Conductor. During his twelve seasons with the company he conducted fifty different new productions, including The Trojans, Prince Igor, The Midsummer Marriage (Tippett), and the British stage première of Richard Strauss’s Daphne. He also conducted numerous orchestral concerts, including festival appearances in France and Germany.
He has made many successful recordings of British and Russian music, and has an extensive career in the concert-hall and opera-house that takes him to leading musical centres throughout Central Europe, Scandinavia, Russia, Israel, Australia, Japan, Canada and the Americas. His highly acclaimed cycle of Bax’s symphonies and tone poems for Naxos (The Gramophone Award) was completed in the autumn of 2003.
In 2007 he was given the rare distinction of being made an Honorary Member of the Royal Philharmonic Society.
