Jack Symonds
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Jack Symonds is a composer, conductor and accompanist, and Artistic Director of Sydney Chamber Opera. He studied composition at the Royal College of Music, London under Kenneth Hesketh and at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music where he received the University Medal. Trained also as a pianist and trombonist, he continues to work regularly as an accompanist and pianist, giving the premiere of many new works as well as frequently conducting his own and others' music, including Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, Owen Wingrave & The Turn of the Screw, Dusapin’s Passion & O Mensch!, Romitelli’s An Index of Metals with Ensemble Offspring, Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill, Kurtág’s … pas à pas- nulle part…, Saariaho’s La Passion de Simone, Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse, Kancheli’s Exil, Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen (for Victorian Opera and SCO). He has also conducted the world premieres of Gyger’s Fly Away Peter & Oscar and Lucinda, Finsterer’s Biographica, Ricketson’s The Howling Girls and Smetanin’s Mayakovsky.
Significant composition premieres include Climbing Toward Midnight, a chamber opera re-imagining the second act of Wagner’s Parsifal, a piece for New York’s JACK Quartet, the Dostoevsky opera Notes from Underground (2011, restaged at Carriageworks in 2016), a string work for Australian Chamber Orchestra, stage work Nunc Dimittis, Sunless Communion for the Composers Ensemble at Dartington where he studied with Detlev Glanert as well as new pieces for Timo-Veikko Valve, Jane Sheldon, four works for Australia Piano Quartet, the Streeton Trio, a viola d’amore and percussion double concerto for BIFEM and a 2015 concert series curated around his music by Affinity Collective which included three premieres. His debut CD ‘Cycle and Song’ was released on Hospital Hill in 2016.