Hilary Griffiths

Hilary Griffiths is a British conductor now living in Germany. During the last fifteen years he has held appointments as General Music Director of the Symphony Orchestra and Opera in Regensburg, Chief Conductor of the Prague State Opera, Music Director of the Oberhausen Opera, Principal Conductor at the Cologne Opera (and Director of the Cologne Opera Studio), and Music Director of the Eutin Opera Festival. He works as a guest conductor throughout Europe, has made several recent visits to the Far East, Australia and South America, and has appeared at the festivals of Edinburgh, Camden, Schwetzingen, Wiesbaden, Gmunden, Prague, Litomysl, Miskolc, Hong Kong and Perth (Australia).

His repertoire of more than 90 operas includes the complete middle and late Verdi and all the regularly performed operas of Mozart, Rossini and Puccini. He concentrates also on the German repertoire (Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, Eugen d’Albert, Alexander Zemlinsky, Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, Hans Werner Henze) and on the Czech repertoire (Antonín Dvořák, Bedřich Smetana, Leoš Janáček). He conducted the first European performances of three operas by the Scottish composer Thea Musgrave (b. 1928), and the world premieres of Das Gauklermärchen (1988) by Gerhard Konzelmann and Lulu (1990) by the Italian composer Nino Rota in the Cologne Opera House. Since 2000 he has been a regular guest at the Tenerife Opera Festival, other productions during the last few years included Porgy and Bess for the State Opera, Istanbul, Tosca, Aida and Zauberflöte at the Cologne Opera and Don Pasquale and Madama Butterfly for the National Opera of Colombia, Bogotá.

Hilary Griffiths has conducted over two hundred performances from twenty three different productions at the State Opera. Death in Venice will be his ninth opera in a new production. These included Strauss’ Salome, Zemlinsky’s Eine florentische Tragödie and Der Zwerg, Mozart’s La Finta giardiniera and Die Zauberflöte, Schoenberg’s Erwartung, Leoncavallo’s La bohème, Eugen d’Albert’s Tiefland and Verdi’s I vespri sicialiani. From 2009 he will be Chief Conductor of the Opera of Wuppertal in Germany