JONATHAN EATON
Artistic Director
Jonathan Eaton has directed widely in opera houses throughout North America and Europe. His productions ran at New York City Opera for fifteen years and included Turandot, Carmen, and Cavalleria Rusticana and I Pagliacci, which were televised for nationwide broadcast on “Great Performances Live from Lincoln Center.” Other companies he has worked for in the US include Chicago Lyric, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Dallas and San Diego operas, with multiple productions at the Santa Fe and Spoleto festivals. In Canada he has directed for the Canadian Opera and Vancouver Opera; in Britain, the Royal Opera Covent Garden, English National, Welsh National and Opera North; in Germany, the Hannover, Würzburg Dessau and Bielefeld operas, and multiple productions for the Bochumer Symphoniker and Ruhr Triennale. Other European companies include The Netherlands Opera and in France the operas of Nantes, Lyons and Nancy.
He served as Artistic Director of Pittsburgh Festival Opera for 20 years, directing more than forty productions. Among these were a series of Kurt Weill works with conductor Julius Rudel, including Lost in the Stars and the American premiere of Die Bürgschaft, which was also featured in the Weill Festspiele in Dessau Germany. In addition Eaton led a historic revival of Duke Ellington’s Beggar’s Holiday, and presented Daron Hagen’s Shining Brow, an opera about Frank Lloyd Wright, on the terraces of Fallingwater. He created Pittsburgh’s first Ring Cycle in Jonathan Dove’s reduced orchestration with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.
In addition to his work for Pittsburgh Festival Opera, Eaton served as Artistic and Stage Director of !SING—DAY OF SONG for Ruhr 2010 Cultural Capital of Europe. He led a series of projects over three years encouraging singing, which culminated in June 2010 with more than a million people singing in 53 cities simultaneously, 500 choral concerts and a fully-staged mega-concert with 58,000 singers which he directed in the Schalke football stadium, and which was televised by WDR and broadcast across Europe.
Eaton served the University of North Texas as Director of Opera and Bill and Margot Winspear Chair in Opera Studies. He was also Professor of Opera at CCM in Cincinnati, and Director of Opera at Carnegie Mellon University and the Cleveland Institute of Music.
BERNARD MCDONALD
Music Director
Bernard McDonald has worked with major opera companies in North America, Europe, and the Far East. International appearances have included engagements at the New National Theatre Tokyo, the Netherlands Opera, the Netherlands Radio Choir, the Dutch National Opera Academy, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and productions of Carmen, La Bohème, Die Zauberflöte, and Le Nozze di Figaro for Opera Kelowna in British Columbia.
Upcoming engagements include Le Nozze di Figaro (Indianapolis Opera), Don Giovanni (Opera Orlando), Mozart and Salieri and The Magic Flute (Mobile Opera), Recent engagements include, Rigoletto, Tosca, La Bohème, Suor Angelica, Gianni Schicchi, Il tabarro, Le Villi, La Canterina, Ghosts of Gatsby, Trouble in Tahiti, and Gallantry at Mobile Opera, West Side Story (associate conductor) with Indianapolis Opera, and Rusalka with Opera Orlando. McDonald conducted the US staged première of Montemezzi’s L’incantesimo for Pittsburgh Festival Opera, where he also conducted productions of Gianni Schicchi, Le Nozze di Figaro, The Merry Widow, and The Magic Flute.
Professional training at the San Francisco Opera Merola Program led directly to an invitation to join the music staff of the New York City Opera. He was subsequently Head of Music and Chorus Master at the Florida Grand Opera in Miami. As chorus master at Glyndebourne, he prepared over twenty-five productions to great critical acclaim for a host of internationally renowned conductors including Idomeneo with Sir Simon Rattle, Die Zauberflöte with Sir Charles Mackerras, and Otello with Vladimir Jurowski.
Additional appearances include the Aspen Music Festival, the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir, Pittsburgh Opera, the Central Iowa Symphony, and Bay View Music Festival. He has worked as a vocal coach at the Manhattan School of Music, Indiana University Opera Theater, University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (CCM), and Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS). He studied piano and collaborative piano at the RCS; opera coaching and accompanying at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, and CCM; musicology at the University of Glasgow; and conducting at Indiana University.