Jeffrey Tate - Conductor with a Love for Opera

Born in Salisbury, England, Jeffrey Tate started out with a passion for the medical field. He studied medicine at Cambridge University, and even qualified as a doctor at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London.

But life headed in a new direction for Jeffery Tate when he began to attend classes at the London Opera Center in 1970. In the same year he joined the music staff at Covent Garden as a rehearsal pianist and coach. During this time Tate decided to make music his career.

After his studies at the Opera Center in 1971, Tate served as chorus master and then principal assistant at Covent Garden until 1977. While at Covent Garden he came into contact with such musical greats as Sir Georg Solti and Sir Colin Davis. He then worked in succession as assistant to Herbert von Karajan at Salzburg, James Levine at the Met and John Pritchard in Cologne. Tate’s big moment came in 1978 when he made his conducting debut with the opera Carmen at the Gothenburg Opera in Sweden.

Tate became increasingly involved with important productions, such as Don Giovanni by Mozart at the Met in 1983, Parsifal by Wagner in Nice, Ariadne auf Naxos by Strauss in Paris in 1984, and the first performance of Ulysses’ Homecoming by Monteverdi/Henze at the 1985 Salzburg Festival .

In 1985 Tate was also appointed principal conductor of the English Chamber Orchestra, and the next year named senior director of music at Covent Garden. In 1989 he was chosen as music director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic and principal guest conductor of the Orchestre National de France. In 1990 he took over as conductor of the European Community Youth Orchestra. He reaffirmed his relationship to opera by accepting a slot as principal guest conductor at the Royal Opera House, London in 1991.

Jeffery Tate is well known among classical music lovers in Germany too. He assisted Pierre Boulez for the annual Richard Wagner festival in Bayreuth, southern Germany, early on in his career. In the year 2000, Tate conducted the premiere of Luigi Nono’s 1960s provocative and political opera, Intolleranza, at the Cologne Opera House. Intolleranza was originally conceived as a political work that opposed racial discrimination and social injustices. Together with German director Günther Krämer, Tate worked on adapting the work from the 1960s to present day Germany.