MICHAEL LLOYD

Michael Lloyd studied music at the University of East Anglia and at the Royal College of Music, London. He joined Scottish Ballet as company pianist in 1972 and there began his conducting career. In 1976 he moved to Kassel in Germany, where he conducted both opera and ballet, and then to Stuttgart, where he continued to conduct opera. At the same time he worked as Associate Chorus Master for three choruses, including the South German Radio Chorus. He also performed as a continuo player with the Ludwigsburg Festival Orchestra, including a Far East tour, and a recording of Judas Maccabeus with Peter Schreier. In 1985 he joined English National Opera, making his conducting debut in 1986 with Madam Butterfly. He conducted an extensive repertoire for the Company, including new productions of Donizetti’s Elixir of Love and Verdi’s Nabucco, the European première of Philip Glass’s The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 and Britten’s Turn of the Screw on ENO’s highly successful tour of the USSR in 1990. In 1989 he was appointed Assistant Music Director, and in 1998 Senior Resident Conductor.



Michael subsequently left English National Opera as in the meantime his conducting career had taken him to New Zealand, Singapore, Macao, Norway and Australia. In the UK he has conducted for Welsh National Opera, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, the Ulster Orchestra, English Touring Opera, British Youth Opera, Opera Holland Park and English National Ballet. He was also music director for some twenty months for Lord Lloyd-Webber’s production of The Sound of Music in the London Palladium. More recently he has been Principal Guest Conductor at the Magdeburg Opera House, Germany, where he has conducted opera, operetta, ballet and symphony concerts. Every year in Magdeburg, on January 16, Beethoven’s Choral Symphony is performed in memory of the night in 1945 when the city was almost completely destroyed by allied bombers. Michael was asked to conduct the performance in 2011 and he was the first ever British or American conductor to do so. Michael teaches regularly at the opera schools of the Royal College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. Michael is Musical Director of the Birmingham Philharmonic Orchestra and the Chandos Symphony Orchestra, Malvern, two of the country’s leading nonprofessional orchestras.