Orlando Jopling

Who is Orlando Jopling?

After a music degree from Cambridge University, Orlando studied with Sir Colin Davis, George Hurst and Colin Metters at the RAM and Diego Masson at Dartington. In his twenties he assisted Sir Colin Davis with his chamber orchestral versions of all the late Beethoven Quartets, Wyn Davies for Scottish Opera, and André Previn on A Streetcar Named Desire, working with the LSO.

He now occasionally conducts the English Chamber Orchestra both in the recording studio and on the concert platform, and has also recently appeared with the London Mozart Players, Sinfonia Viva and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. He is a champion of living composers, and a particular advocate of Sibelius, Janáček, Ravel, lesser-known British composers and the Viennese waltz and operetta tradition. Other recent repertoire has included Elgar's 2nd Symphony and Stravinsky's Song of the Nightingale, Prokofiev, as well as historically-informed performances of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms.

He has also worked closely with Sinéad O'Connor, Martha Wainwright and Linda Thompson, and has written and orchestrated music for film and TV.

Jopling is a graduate of the National Opera Studio in London where he won the first Leonard Hancock scholarship. He also founded Tête à Tête, who have commissioned operas and presented the modern world première of Vivaldi's lost opera Orlando finto pazzo. Over the last six years he has built up Stanley Hall Opera into an established annual festival with an enviable reputation. With them he has cast and conducted Cosí fan tutte, Figaro, Don Pasquale, Falstaff, Cenerentola and the first ever professional production in English of Rossini's La Pietra del Paragone. Other opera work includes Figaro for Savoy Opera, The Merry Widow for Carl Rosa, La Scala di Seta for Independent Opera, and Don Giovanni in Vienna with the Schönbrunn Orchestra. He now has a particular reputation for the middle-late bel canto tradition.