David Lloyd-Jones, who passed away on June 8, 2022 aged 87 was father to two Rugbeians, a pioneering opera

director, conductor, translator, scholar and Russian music specialist.

Born on November 19, 1934 in London,

Lloyd-Jones was the son of a high court judge. During the war he was evacuated to a farm in west Wales, but later attended Westminster School.

On his 10th birthday, David was taken by his father to the Royal Albert Hall with Thomas Beecham conducting the orchestra, an outing which ignited his lifelong love of music.

As a boy he also met Ralph Vaughan Williams, who showed him ‘great kindness’ and later met Igor Shostakovich in his more mature years, describing him as “a rather miserable little man”.

After Westminster, he attended the Joint Services School of Linguists’ Russian programme for national service before studying German and Russian at Magdalen College, Oxford.

A Magdalen friend was organ scholar Dudley Moore who led the college orchestra when, in 1957, Lloyd-Jones directed a recently rediscovered Haydn mass.

David 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.

David made his greatest mark in 1978, when along with Lord 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.

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.

During the 1970s, David bought a tumbledown house in woods near Petworth called Siblands, which he restored and established as a favourite family retreat.

In 1964 he married Carol (Carolyn) Whitehead, who died in 2016. They had a daughter and two sons who attended Rugby, Gareth (M 80-84) and Simon (81-86). Gareth, a restaurateur, was Deputy Head Boy and Holder of Bigside Bags and later President of the Rugbeian Society (2016-19) and a school governor. Simon is managing director of an energy renewables firm.

Carol and David were enthusiastic and generous hosts, delighting in finding new friends and keeping in touch with old associates.

Adapted from The British Music Society, the Guardian, Gramophone and the Telegraph.