Jeffrey Tate

Jeffrey Tate CBE (born 28 April 1943, Salisbury) is an English conductor.

Tate was born with spina bifida, and also has kyphosis. His family moved to Farnham, Surrey when he was young and he attended Farnham Grammar School between 1954 and 1961 gaining a State Scholarship to Cambridge University, where he directed theatre productions. Tate initially read medicine at Christ's College, Cambridge (1961–64), specializing in eye surgery. He later worked at St Thomas's Hospital, London, before giving up his clinical career to study music at the London Opera Centre. He became a repetiteur and a coach at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, under the tutelage of Sir Georg Solti.[1]

Tate's international conducting début was with the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1979. In 1985, he was appointed the first principal conductor of the English Chamber Orchestra. He was named to the position of principal conductor of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden effective in September 1986, the first person in the House's history to have that title.[2] He was principal conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra from 1991 to 1995. In 2005, he was appointed music director of the San Carlo Theatre of Naples. Tate's recordings include a series of Mozart piano concertos with Dame Mitsuko Uchida.[3]

Tate has been president of UK Spina Bifida charity ASBAH since 1989. A portrait of Jeffrey Tate is in David Blum's book Quintet, Five Journeys toward Musical Fulfillment (Cornell University Press, 1999). It originally appeared as an article in the 30 April 1990 issue of The New Yorker.

In October 2007, the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra announced the appointment of Tate as its next chief conductor, as of the spring of 2008.[4][5]

Personal life

Tate is gay, which he has described as being an outsider on two scores. "The gay world is immensely hung up with physical perfection for some curious reason … Therefore, being disabled in that world is harder".[6] His partner is Klaus Kuhlemann, a German geomorphologist, whom he met when conducting at Cologne from 1977.[7]

References

  1. ↑ David Blum (19 June 1994). "Bucking the Biggest Odds of All". New York Times. Retrieved 2007-10-12.
  2. ↑ "Royal Opera Appoints Tate as Top Conductor". New York Times. 6 December 1984. Retrieved 2007-10-12.
  3. ↑ Dinitia Smith (8 April 1997). "Rapturous Sorrow From a Pianist of Intellectual Rigor". New York Times. Retrieved 2007-10-12.
  4. ↑ Peter Krause (29 October 2007). "Jeffrey Tate wird neuer Chefdirigent". Die Welt. Retrieved 2009-02-25.
  5. ↑ Kevin Shihoten (5 November 2007). "Jeffrey Tate Replaces Andrey Boreyko as Hamburg Symphony Chief Conductor". Playbill Arts. Retrieved 2007-11-07.
  6. ↑ Ben Holgate, "Tate à Tate", The Weekend Australian, Review, 26-27 September 1998, p. 17
  7. ↑ David Blum, Quintet: Five Journeys Towards Musical Fulfillment, p. 59. Retrieved 11 January 2014

External links

Cultural offices
Preceded by
no predecessor		 Principal Conductor, English Chamber Orchestra
1985–2000 		Succeeded by
Ralf Gothóni
Preceded by
James Conlon		 Principal Conductor, Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra
1991–1995 		Succeeded by
Valery Gergiev
Preceded by
Gary Bertini		 Music Director, Teatro di San Carlo in Naples
2005–2010 		Succeeded by
Maurizio Benini
Preceded by
Andrey Boreyko		 Chief Conductor, Hamburg Symphony Orchestra
2009–present 		Succeeded by
incumbent