Finnegan Downie Dear
Conductor
Finnegan Downie Dear is Music Director of Shadwell Opera. As a conductor, he is becoming increasingly recognised as a proponent of vocal music of the 20th and 21st centuries. Since 2014 he has worked regularly for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, returning this season to join the music staff for productions of Shostakovich The Nose and Thomas Adès The Exterminating Angel. Other plans for this season include assisting Simone Young in Paris (Carmen) and London (Eotvos Senza Sangue), Thomas Adès in Dublin (Gerald Barry Alice) and Lothar Koenigs in Warsaw (Die Tote Stadt).
Finnegan studied at Cambridge University and the Royal Academy of Music where he received the Gerald Moore Award and Hodgson Memorial Scholarship to spend a year curating a series of concerts focussing on Mahler’s complete song catalogue. As a pianist, Finnegan has given recitals at venues including the Wigmore Hall, St. John’s, Smith Square, the Crush Room at the Royal Opera House and Kings Place, and has appeared as part of the Oxford Lieder, Aberystwyth, Buxton, Cambridge, Gower, St. Magnus International and Oxford Lieder Festivals, as well as live on BBC Radio 3. He was an International Opera Awards Foundation recipient for 2015/16 and a Samling Artist for 2014/15 and 2015/16.
Finnegan studied at Cambridge University and the Royal Academy of Music where he received the Gerald Moore Award and Hodgson Memorial Scholarship to spend a year curating a series of concerts focussing on Mahler’s complete song catalogue. As a pianist, Finnegan has given recitals at venues including the Wigmore Hall, St. John’s, Smith Square, the Crush Room at the Royal Opera House and Kings Place, and has appeared as part of the Oxford Lieder, Aberystwyth, Buxton, Cambridge, Gower, St. Magnus International and Oxford Lieder Festivals, as well as live on BBC Radio 3. He was an International Opera Awards Foundation recipient for 2015/16 and a Samling Artist for 2014/15 and 2015/16.
Finnegan appears in Schoenberg and Poetry on 27 June 2018 and Words and Music on 30 June 2018