Philip Walsh, Conductor

2010 marks Philip Walsh’s tenth season with Lyrique-en-Mer.

Over the past nine summers he has conducted more than 80 performances for the festival, including the first complete opera to be performed on the island, Le Nozze di Figaro in 2001. Other performances have been Tosca, Falstaff, Don Giovanni, Dido and Aeneas, Don Pasquale, La Bohème, Carmen, Die Zauberflöte, Madame Butterfly, Orphée et Eurydice, La Traviata and Les Contes d’Hoffmann as well as Brahms’ Ein Deutches Requiem and Gounod’s Messe de Sainte Cecile. As Music Director, he visits the island frequently during the year, to work with the Belle-Île choir, and also to introduce music to young people in the island’s schools.

His performances elsewhere have included Peter Brook’s La Tragédie de Carmen (Opéra de Bordeaux), Thomas Adès’s Powder her Face (Opéra de Metz), La Bohème (English Touring Opera), Britten’s Death in Venice (Metz), and the premiere of Jürgen Simpson’s Thwaite (Almeida Opera), the first prizewinner of the inaugural Genesis Opera Project. He performed in the 2006 Aldeburgh Festival, conducting the premiere of Emily Hall’s opera about the Rwanda genocide, Sante, and in 2007 he made his Spanish debut, conducting Don Giovanni for Opera en Vigo. He has worked with orchestras such as the London Sinfonietta, the City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong, L’Orchestre National de Lorraine and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

Recently he made his debut in Italy, conducting Adès’s Powder her Face at the Lugo Opera Festival. He returns to Italy later in 2010 to conduct the same production at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna.

Born in Southampton, Philip Walsh studied piano and organ and went on to study at Cambridge University. After graduating he spent a number of years in New Zealand, where he was Music Director of the Wellington Youth Orchestra, conductor of the Orpheus Choir of Wellington, and Director of Music at Wellington Cathedral. His repertoire includes works as diverse as Stravinsky’s Les Noces, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, Tippett A child of our time, Verdi’s Requiem and Bach Mass in B minor. He is a passionate advocate of new music and has commissioned and conducted numerous premiere performances.

He returns to Belle-Île in 2010 to conduct Rigoletto and Così fan tutte.