Edward Downes

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Sir Edward Thomas Downes, CBE (born June 17, 1924 in Birmingham, England) is an English conductor. He took up the piano and violin when he was five and sang as a boy chorister. At age sixteen he won a scholarship to Birmingham University where he studied English and music, and began playing the English horn. Downes' pursuit of conducting was aided by a two-year Carnegie scholarship from Aberdeen, which allowed him to study with Hermann Scherchen after postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Music.

The conductor's long and fruitful association with London's Royal Opera House Covent Garden began in 1952 with his appointment as an assistant to Rafael Kubelik. He remained a company member for 17 years, returning annually thereafter as a guest conductor before assuming the post of Associate Music Director in 1991. To date, Downes has conducted 950 performances of 49 operas at Covent Garden[1].

Elsewhere, he became Australian Opera's Music Director in 1970, conducting the first performance in the Sydney Opera House. He was Chief Conductor of the Netherlands Radio Orchestra until 1983. While Downes has worked with many of the world's symphony orchestras, he has enjoyed a particularly long relationship with the BBC Philharmonic (formerly the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra), serving as its Chief Guest Conductor, then Principal Conductor^[1], and finally as Conductor Emeritus.

Downes is noted for his championing of British music, and for Prokofiev and Verdi. He has advocated the symphonies of George Lloyd and premiered works by Peter Maxwell Davies and Malcolm Arnold. His passion for Prokofiev has been felt in performances of both major and lesser-known Prokofiev scores throughout the world. He conducted the British première of War and Peace in a concert performance at Leeds Town Hall in 1967, and orchestrated Prokofiev's one-act opera Maddalena in 1979 and subsequently gave its world premiere.

Downes' first experience of conducting the music of Giuseppe Verdi came in 1953 when Kubelik withdrew from a Covent Garden Otello and Downes led the opera with no rehearsal. He felt on home ground, and since then has championed Verdi revivals in England. He has conducted 25 of Verdi's 28 operas, and he devised the idea to perform all of them in time for the 2001 centenary of the composer's death. Downes' regret is that he has never conducted Alzira, Un Giorno di Regno or, especially, Les vêpres siciliennes. The conductor: "I seemed to understand Verdi as a person. He was a peasant. He had one foot in heaven and one on the earth. And this is why he appeals to all classes of people, from those who know everything about music to those who are hearing it for the first time." [2]

He was appointed CBE in 1986 and knighted in 1991.

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