Stephen Stubbs

Conductor

“A performance of uncommon quality…. The most impressive thing about Stubbs’s direction was its total naturalness and freedom from the doctrinaire….There was not a single tempo from beginning to end of the afternoon that did not seem inevitable, nor a single rhythm that attracted inappropriate attention.”

— Seen and Heard International

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Biography

Stephen Stubbs, who won the GRAMMY Award as conductor for Best Opera Recording in 2015, maintains a busy calendar as a guest conductor, specializing in baroque opera and oratorio.

Stubbs began his career as an opera conductor with Stefano Landi's La Morte d'Orfeo at the 1987 Bruges festival, which led to the founding of the ensemble Tragicomedia. Since 1997 Stephen has co-directed the bi-annual Boston Early Music Festival opera and is the permanent artistic co-director. BEMF’s recordings were nominated for six Grammy awards in 2005, 2007, and 2009, 2015, 2017, and 2019. The 2015 Grammy win was for Charpentier’s La descente d’Orphee. Also in 2015 BEMF recordings won two Echo Klassik awards in Germany, and the Diapason d’Or de l’Année in France. In 2017 they were presented with the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik.

In 2008 he established Pacific MusicWorks in Seattle. The company's inaugural presentation was a revival of South African artist William Kentridge's acclaimed multimedia staging of Claudio Monteverdi’s The Return of Ulysses in a co-production with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. With Pacific MusicWorks, he went on to conduct staged productions of Handel’s Semele, Mozart’s Magic Flute, Gluck’s Orphée and concert performances of Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers, Bach’s St John Passion, and Handel’s Trionfo del Tempo, Apollo and Daphne, Messiah and Samson. In its celebratory tenth season (2018/19) Pacific MusicWorks released its first commercial recording:  Total Eclipse: Handel’s Tenor featuring GRAMMY Award-winning Tenor, Aaron Sheehan.

Following a successful debut conducting the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, he was subsequently invited back to conduct the Symphony’s performances of Messiah, a work he has also conducted with Houston Symphony, Edmonton Symphony, Alabama Symphony, and Symphony Nova Scotia. Other guest appearances include the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Baroque Chamber Orchestra of Colorado, Musica Angelica, and Early Music Vancouver.

As a guest conductor of opera, Stubbs has made multiple appearances with Opera Omaha including Handel’s Agrippina, Semele, and in the 19/20 season was booked there for Stradella’s San Giovanni Battista. Other recent opera engagements include Monteverdi’s Tancredi et Clorinda and Tirsi et Clori with Seattle Opera, and Stefano Landi’s La Morte d’Orfeo for Los Angeles Opera. Overseas, he has led performances of Gluck's Orfeo and Handel's Giulio Cesare in Egitto in Bilbao, Spain, and Monteverdi's Orfeo at Amsterdam's Netherlands Opera.

Much in demand for work with student and emerging performers, he is a regular at leading conservatories and training programs, including the Juilliard School, where he most recently conducted Cavalli’s La Calisto and Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie, and UCLA Opera where he has conducted Cavalli’s Giasone, Handel’s Agrippina, Amadigi, and L’Allegro, Monteverdi’s Poppea, and Charpentier’s La descente d’Orphee; Mozart’s Il re pastore at the Merola Opera Institute; Handel’s Rodelinda with the A.J. Fletcher Opera Institute at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts; and Mozart’s Così fan tutte and Die Zauberflöte at the Hawaii Performing Arts Festival. From 2013-2018 he was Senior Artist in Residence at the University of Washington’s School of Music.

Stephen Stubbs was born in Seattle, Washington, where he studied composition, piano and harpsichord at the University of Washington. In 1974 he moved to England and then Amsterdam, and soon became a mainstay of the burgeoning early-music movement there, working with Alan Curtis on Italian opera in Italy, William Christie on French opera in France, as well as various ensembles in England and Germany, particularly the Hilliard Ensemble, which led to his career as a conductor and musical director.