David Lloyd-Jones, who has died aged 87, was not only a conductor, but also a scholar, translator and a leading light in British musical life. Perhaps only his friend Charles Mackerras before him displayed as wide a range of expertise and sympathies, Lloyd-Jones’s editions ranging from Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov to Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers.
He made his greatest mark in 1978, when along with Lord (George) Harewood and Graham Marchant he founded Opera North, known at the outset as English National Opera North. Marchant acted as general administrator, while Lloyd-Jones became the first music director of the company and its orchestra, known initially as the English Northern Philharmonia, the first of its kind in Leeds. The touring programme to other regional centres and out-of-the-way venues was just as vital as performances at the Grand Theatre, the company’s base.
Lloyd-Jones was keen for the operation to achieve independence from the English National Opera in London, from which Harewood had launched the operation. This came in 1981, and Lloyd-Jones’s passion and determination ensured that the company became a still-flourishing institution.
The first of the 50 productions that Lloyd-Jones conducted in his 12 years at Opera North was Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila. Lloyd-Jones had given the UK premiere of Prokofiev’s War and Peace at the London Coliseum in 1972 for Sadler’s Wells Opera before it became ENO, and Russian operas were to the forefront among the wide range of works that followed for Opera North. It was quite an achievement for a smaller company to put on Russian epics such as Boris Godunov and Borodin’s Prince Igor, and the production of Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges that he conducted in 1989 marked the beginning of Richard Jones’s greatest, quirkiest productions for the operatic stage. There were also UK premieres for Ernst Krenek’s Jonny Spielt Auf and Strauss’s Daphne.
Born in London, David was the son of well-heeled parents, Margaret (nee Mathias) and Sir Vincent Lloyd-Jones, a high court judge. However, the comfort was soon undermined by wartime evacuation to a farm in west Wales. David heard none of the music that was to be his life until the age of nine, and on his 10th birthday was taken by his father to concert at the Royal Albert Hall concert, with Thomas Beecham conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Performances by Laurence Olivier had no less an impact.
From Westminster school he went on to national service, and had the crucial good luck to be enrolled on the Joint Services School of Linguists’ Russian programme. At Magdalen College, Oxford, he gained a degree in German and Russian (1958), his friends there including the actor Dudley Moore, a fine pianist; as a student the latter was organ scholar and a violinist, leading the college orchestra when, in 1957, Lloyd-Jones directed a recently rediscovered Haydn mass.
Like so many who progress to conducting, Lloyd-Jones began his career as repetiteur, at the Royal Opera House, and took on freelance engagements as a conductor, which took him to the Wexford festival, Scottish Opera and Welsh National Opera. In 1971 he appeared at Covent Garden as a conductor, and by the time he became assistant music director at the Sadler’s Wells company the following year he had provided an English translation – still widely in use – for Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and a revised edition of Boris Godunov, which he also translated.
Published by Oxford University Press in 1969, it built on the Russian musicologist Pavel Lamm’s pioneering work featuring all the music from Mussorgsky’s original seven-scene 1869 version and the extra scenes and interpolations of 1873. This score was the basis of several recordings featuring what has been called the “super-saturated” Boris – in other words, the best of both worlds.
With his other main hat, love of English music, Lloyd-Jones was editor-in-chief for the same publisher’s edition of William Walton’s orchestral works, and he also edited the Falstaff opera Sir John in Love by Vaughan Williams. The composer had been kind at a meeting with the young Lloyd-Jones; he in turn was renowned for his kindness and positive outlook.
Lloyd-Jones’s musical sympathies were broad and deep, as his concert repertoire over the years richly demonstrates. After leaving Leeds in 1990 he became especially known for his championship of British music, notably in a series of recordings for Hyperion and Naxos. In ballet scores from the Sullivan-Mackerras potpourri Pineapple Poll to Vaughan Williams’s Job and Bliss’s Checkmate, and in symphonies by Arnold Bax and Alan Rawsthorne, he has left a superbly recorded and played legacy.
In 1964 he married Carol (Carolyn) Whitehead, and they had two sons and a daughter. Carol died in 2016.
• David Mathias Lloyd-Jones, conductor, born 19 November 1934; died 8 June 2022
