“His shaping of phrases and then paragraphs and whole acts can only be compared to the supreme Wagnerians… his concern for the feeling of a riveting story moving forward is as potent as Furtwängler’s, and it is impossible to say or envisage anything finer than that.”
The Spectator
Richard Farnes has a distinguished career that spans both symphonic music and opera. His contributions to music have been recognised with prestigious awards, including the 2017 Royal Philharmonic Society Conductor of the Year Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Critics’ Circle Music Awards, and the Achievement in Opera Award at the UK Theatre Awards in 2014.
In recent years he has conducted a wide range of orchestras, appearing with the London Symphony and London Philharmonic Orchestras, the Philharmonia, Russian National Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra in Dublin, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Royal Danish Orchestra in Copenhagen, Royal Northern Sinfonia, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Manchester Camerata and all the BBC orchestras. With the BBC Symphony Orchestra he has appeared at the BBC Proms in London and at the Dubai Proms where in 2019 he conducted the first ever performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the city. Following engagements in successive years to conduct the Symphony Orchestra of India in Mumbai, he appeared with them on a tour of the UK in 2023.
From 2004 to 2016 Richard was Music Director of Opera North in Leeds, conducting a wide range of orchestral repertoire as well as productions of Manon Lescaut, La bohème, Tosca, La fanciulla del West, La Rondine, La traviata, Otello, Falstaff, Macbeth, Giovanna d’Arco, Don Carlos, Un ballo in maschera, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Il matrimonio segreto, Peter Grimes, Gloriana, The Turn of the Screw, Death in Venice, Werther, Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades, Kát’a Kabanová, The Makropoulos Case and From the House of the Dead as well as premiere productions of David Sawer’s Skin Deep and Simon Holt’s The Nightingale’s to Blame. With Opera North he made recordings of Don Carlos and Bluebeard’s Castle for Chandos Records.
After concert hall productions of Salome, Elektra, Hänsel und Gretel, Bluebeard’s Castle and Der fliegende Holländer Richard embarked with Opera North on an ambitious project to perform Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen semi-staged, which culminated in 2016 with six highly-acclaimed complete Ring cycles presented in Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham, Gateshead and London, and subsequently streamed online. In 2022 he returned to Opera North to conduct semi-staged performances of Parsifal in various UK cities.
For the Royal Opera in London Richard has conducted Simon Boccanegra, Il trovatore and Death in Venice, and Falstaff at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Return visits for Don Carlo at the Royal Opera and Manon Lescaut at the Met were casualties of Covid-19. He has had close associations with both Glyndebourne - conducting The Makropoulos Case, La traviata, Jonathan Dove’s Flight and Sir Peter Hall’s production of Otello at the Festival as well as Albert Herring, Die Entführung and Le nozze di Figaro on tour - and Scottish Opera, where he has conducted Tosca, La boheme, Die Zauberflöte, L’elisir d’amore, the world première of David Horne’s Friend of the People and a double bill of works by Param Vir.
Other opera engagements have included The Turn of the Screw with the London Symphony Orchestra, La traviata for the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen, The Cunning Little Vixen and Tosca at English National Opera, Nabucco for New Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv, Hänsel und Gretel with the Russian National Orchestra at the Tchaikovsky Hall in Moscow, highly acclaimed productions of Falstaff and The Turn of the Screw for Garsington Opera, and various projects for Birmingham Opera Company, English Touring Opera and Opera Theatre Company in Dublin (The Rake’s Progress and The Cunning Little Vixen). He returned to English National Opera at the end of 2023 for La traviata and again in 2024 for Rigoletto.
Richard read Music at King’s College, Cambridge where he was both a boy chorister and latterly organ scholar, and subsequently studied at the Guildhall School of Music, Royal Academy of Music and the National Opera Studio in London. He was awarded a European Community Youth Orchestra Scholarship for his contribution to the orchestra as its keyboard player under Claudio Abbado and Erich Leinsdorf.
Richard takes a keen interest in music education and the importance of its place in the curriculum. He is a primary school governor and enjoys teaching the piano locally. He also gives individual and group tuition in Conducting, and coaches conducting students at the Jette Parker Artists’ Programme at the Royal Opera in London. In recent years Richard has worked with students at the Royal College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music. During the Covid-19 pandemic he rehearsed and conducted a groundbreaking performance with the Guildhall Symphony Orchestra using Low Latency technology, allowing different sections of the orchestra to play simultaneously from separate buildings - thought to be a world first.
In addition to his wide-ranging musical pursuits, Richard is an accomplished portrait and landscape photographer (see www.richardfarnesphotography.com). For several years he has been photographing instrumentalists for Young Sounds UK, a highly successful charity that supports talented young musicians from low income families to help them overcome financial and social barriers. He has a passion for astronomy, hill-walking and general peace and quiet, and particularly enjoys travelling to the island of La Palma in the Canaries where all of those can be enjoyed in abundance!
