Biography

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 (2017), Owen Wingrave (2013- Australian premiere) & The Turn of the Screw (2010), Saariaho’s La Passion de Simone (2019 Sydney Festival) Dusapin’s Passion & O Mensch! (2016 Sydney Festival- Australian premieres), Romitelli’s An Index of Metals with Ensemble Offspring (2015), Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill & Kurtág’s … pas à pas- nulle part… (2014 Sydney Festival), Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse (2012), Kancheli’s Exil (2013) and Jonathan Dove’s chamber version of Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen (2011- Australian premiere and 2017 for Victorian Opera). He has also conducted the world premieres of Elliott Gyger’s Fly Away Peter and Oscar and Lucinda Mary Finsterer’s Biographica, Damien Ricketson’s The Howling Girls and Michael Smetanin’s Mayakovsky.

Significant composition premieres include The Shape of the Earth after Patrick White’s Voss, 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, (2011), the song cycle Time Unredeemed (2010), a large-scale piece for viola and piano, Song Cycle, written for violist James Wannan (2011), Sunless Communion (2013) for the Composers Ensemble at Dartington where he studied with Detlev Glanert as well as new pieces for Timo-Veikko Valve, Jane Sheldon, three works for Australia Piano Quartet, the Streeton Trio, cellist Patrick Murphy, 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.
CD released on Hospital Hill 

SOUNDCLOUD https://soundcloud.com/jacksymonds

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