Finnegan Downie Dear

Conductor

Finnegan Downie Dear is a young conductor and pianist from London who balances a growing international career with his role as music director of Shadwell Opera. He is increasingly recognised as an ardent proponent of music of the 20th and 21st centuries, and has a particular interest in working with singers in opera and recital. This season he makes his debuts with Polish National Opera in Lublin (Korngold Die Tote Stadt) and Scottish Opera (Turnage Greek) as well as conducting a new production of Peter Maxwell Davies The Lighthouse with Shadwell Opera, having previously conducted productions of operas by George Benjamin, Jonathan Dove, Mark-Anthony Turnage and Schoenberg, and fully-staged performances of music theatre works by Maxwell Davies, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Walton.

Since 2014 he has worked for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden as an assistant and repetiteur, most recently on Thomas Adès The Exterminating Angel, having acted as an assistant and orchestral pianist in the work’s creation at the Salzburg Festspiele 2016. He has also acted as an assistant to Richard Baker in London and Aldeburgh, Lothar Koenigs in Warsaw, and Simone Young in Paris and London, with whom he will work again this season for Zurich Opera (Parsifal) and Bayerische Staatsoper (From the House of the Dead). This season will also see him make his debut with the RTE Concert Orchestra in the National Concert Hall, Dublin.

Finnegan studied at Cambridge University and the Royal Academy of Music, graduating from both with distinction and from the Academy with the prestigious DipRAM for outstanding performance. Whilst a student at the Academy he was awarded all the major internal awards for accompaniment as well as the Gerald Moore Award, and following his studies was awarded the Academy’s Hodgson Memorial Scholarship to spend a year curating a series of concerts focussing on Mahler’s complete songs. He has recently been elected an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music (ARAM).

Finnegan Downie Dear is a young conductor and pianist from London who balances a growing international career with his role as music director of Shadwell Opera. He is increasingly recognised as an ardent proponent of music of the 20th and 21st centuries, and has a particular interest in working with singers in opera and recital. This season he makes his debuts with Polish National Opera in Lublin (Korngold Die Tote Stadt) and Scottish Opera (Turnage Greek) as well as conducting a new production of Peter Maxwell Davies The Lighthouse with Shadwell Opera, having previously conducted productions of operas by George Benjamin, Jonathan Dove, Mark-Anthony Turnage and Schoenberg, and fully-staged performances of music theatre works by Maxwell Davies, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Walton.

Since 2014 he has worked for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden as an assistant and repetiteur, most recently on Thomas Adès The Exterminating Angel, having acted as an assistant and orchestral pianist in the work’s creation at the Salzburg Festspiele 2016. He has also acted as an assistant to Richard Baker in London and Aldeburgh, Lothar Koenigs in Warsaw, and Simone Young in Paris and London, with whom he will work again this season for Zurich Opera (Parsifal) and Bayerische Staatsoper (From the House of the Dead). This season will also see him make his debut with the RTE Concert Orchestra in the National Concert Hall, Dublin.

Finnegan studied at Cambridge University and the Royal Academy of Music, graduating from both with distinction and from the Academy with the prestigious DipRAM for outstanding performance. Whilst a student at the Academy he was awarded all the major internal awards for accompaniment as well as the Gerald Moore Award, and following his studies was awarded the Academy’s Hodgson Memorial Scholarship to spend a year curating a series of concerts focussing on Mahler’s complete songs. He has recently been elected an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music (ARAM).