About

Henry Kennedy is a young British-Canadian conductor who has established strong credentials in the opera house and concert hall in Europe and North America.

On November 29th 2024, the centenary of Puccini’s death, he conducts a new production of Tosca at the Teatro del Giglio in Lucca, the composer’s birthplace in Tuscany. Further performances follow in March 2025 in the cities of Livorno, Pisa and Ravenna.  Kennedy first appeared in Italy in December 2021, following his participation in the Riccardo Muti Italian Opera Academy, which was filmed in Milan by RAI. Invited to substitute for Riccardo Muti, he conducted concert performances of scenes from Verdi’s Nabucco in Rimini and Ravenna. The Orchestra Giovanile Luigi Cherubini, which played in those concerts, joins Kennedy again for Tosca.

At the start of the 2024-25 season he inaugurated the role of Resident Conductor of the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa. Over his two-year residency in the Canadian capital he will conduct both orchestral and operatic repertoire, building further on the experience he gained during his 2022-23 residency at the Wrocław Opera in Poland, where he collaborated with artistic director Mariusz Kwiecien and music director Bassem Akiki, assisting on operas such as Le nozze di Figaro and Madama Butterfly and taking charge of performances of Don Giovanni, Carmen and Les Pêcheurs de perles.  In Poland he has also conducted Les Pêcheurs de perles at the Silesian Opera in Bytom.

Since 2021, in Italy, Salzburg and Chicago, Riccardo Muti has acted as a mentor to Henry Kennedy for Italian opera and the central symphonic repertoire. Kennedy has also benefited from the sustained guidance of Christian Thielemann in Austro-German operatic and orchestral repertoire, and from Richard Bonynge in the interpretation of French and bel canto opera. Colin Metters (Emeritus Professor of Conducting at the Royal Academy of Music in London), Christopher Seaman and David Zinman have similarly made a crucial contribution to his development as a conductor.

In Summer 2023, as assistant conductor to Sir John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Henry Kennedy contributed to concert performances of Berlioz’s monumental opera Les Troyens at the Berlioz Festival in La Côte-Saint-André, Salzburg Festival, Royal Opera of Versailles, Berliner Philharmonie and the BBC Proms at London’s Royal Albert Hall. In 2022 he acted as assistant conductor to Bassem Akiki for the world premiere of Philippe Boesmans’ final opera On purge bébé at La Monnaie in Brussels. In orchestral repertoire he has assumed responsibilities as assistant to Marin Alsop, Sir Mark Elder, Edward Gardner, Hannu Lintu, Sir Simon Rattle, Jukka Pekka Saraste, Thomas Søndergård and John Wilson, working with such ensembles as the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra Svizzera Italiana, Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich and London Philharmonic Orchestra.

In recent seasons Henry Kennedy has conducted a number of orchestras across Europe, including Warsaw’s Polish Radio Orchestra and, also in Poland, the Sudeten Philharmonic and Zielona Gora Philharmonic, and in Romania the Brasov Philharmonic. In 2017 in London he established the Resonate Symphony Orchestra, which draws together recent graduates of leading British conservatories. Since then, as the orchestra’s music director, he has regularly conducted its players in repertoire ranging from Bach to Wagner, Bruckner and Shostakovich. In 2023 Kennedy and the Resonate Symphony Orchestra opened the Deal Music & Arts Festival in Kent with an adventurous programme that combined music from the 18th century and the present day.

In 2017, in the course of his conducting studies at London’s Royal Academy of Music, he was awarded the Bayreuth Festival Scholarship. Following his graduation with Distinction in 2020, he participated in the Herbert von Karajan Young Conductors Award in Salzburg, where he conducted the Mozarteum Orchestra and Austrian Ensemble for New Music.        

In Generational Relay, Bright Young Maestro Takes Baton And Flies
Review by Matthew Gurewitsch, Classic Voice North America

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