Jonathan Bloxham

The British conductor JONATHAN BLOXHAM is Music Director of the Luzerner Theater, Principal Conductor of the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie and permanent conductor and artistic advisor to the London Mozart Players. In the words of Maestro Paavo Järvi, he is a conductor of consummate technique, innate musicality, a natural sense of orchestra and a deep knowledge and understanding of the symphonic repertoire. He was appointed Music Director of the Lucerne Theatre in 2023 after his debut in 2022 with the opera Bluebeard’s Castle by Béla Bartók. following the great success of the new production of La Boheme, named "opera highlight of the season" in the Luzerner Zeitung, as well as the operas I Capuleti e I Montecchi and Dido and Aeneas, he has been permanent conductor and artistic advisor to the London Mozart Players since October 2022 His operatic debut was in 2019 in performances of Rigoletto with Glyndebourne Touring Opera, in February 2021 he conducted four sell-out performances of Luisa Miller with the London Philharmonic at the Glyndebourne Festival, and in the autumn of that year he conducted Glyndebourne Touring Opera's production Don Pasquale to excellent reviews. Highlights of his guest appearances over the past few seasons include the London Philharmonic, Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra, London Mozart Players, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Orchestre de Halle, Belgian National Orchestra, and various philharmonic orchestras. This season he returns to the BBC Symphony Season with works by Richard Wagner and Charles Ives and makes his debut at the Enescu Festival with the Romanian National Radio Orchestra. In 2021 his first album of works by Richard Strauss and Caesar Franck was released with the Philharmonic Orchestra of Northwest Germany (Herford), highly praised by Musicweb International. In 2024, Bloxham released a recording of Bach's Keyboard Concertos with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, which were voted number one in the Apple Classical Top 100 worldwide. He has also recorded works by Bruce Broughton with the London Symphony Orchestra (2024), as well as discs for the BBC Scottish Symphony (2022) and the London Mozart Players (2023). With the Britten Sinfonia Chamber Ensemble he realised the world premiere of Barbican Glade by Dobrinka Tabakova, Pastoral Symphony by Brett Dean and City Life by Steve Reich as part of the Barbican Centre's 40th anniversary celebrations in London. He has active artistic contacts with many renowned soloists and this season he has worked with Frank Peter Zimmermann, Steven Isserlis, Daniel Mueller-Schott, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Abel Selaocoe, Jess Gillam, Miloš Karadaglić, Timothy Ridout, Mariam Batsashvili, to name but a few. He began his career as assistant conductor to Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla with the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO). There he conducted extensive repertoire from 2016 to 2018, as well as the final concert of the 2016/2017 season. He was then invited by Paavo Järvi to conduct a summer concert with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie, which led to a recording and subscription project with the Bremen Symphony and the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. Since then, he has been a regular guest of world orchestras such as the Residentie Orkest - The Hague, the Philharmonie Orchestra of Luxembourg, the Chamber Orchestra of Lausanne, the Tapiola Sinfonietta, the Basque National Philharmonic, the Malaysian Philharmonic and others. In his native UK he conducts the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the RTE Chamber Orchestra, the Aurora Orchestra, and is a frequent guest of the London Mozart Players, the London Philharmonic and the London Symphony Orchestra. For the past 16 years, Bloxham has been Artistic Director of the Newcastle-upon-Tyne based Northern Chords Festival, commissioning new works from young composers such as Jack Sheen and Freya Waley Cohen. He returns to the Festival in 2025.