CONDUCTOR
Henry Kennedy, a young British Canadian conductor, is a former student of Riccardo Muti’s Opera Academy who entrusted him with the opera Tosca at Teatro del Giglio in Lucca with Orchestra Giovanile Luigi Cherubini, on the anniversary of Puccini’s death on November 29th of last year, production by Luca Orsini. The opera was revived at Teatro Goldoni in Livorno, Teatro Verdi in Pisa and in 2025 at Teatro Alighieri in Ravenna by Henry Kennedy. His interpretative skills were highlighted by the Corriere Fiorentino “but it is the twenty-eight-year-old conductor Henry Kennedy, on the podium of the Cherubini Youth Orchestra, who stands out: a flowing conducting style, revealing continuous sound details, which follows the drama in its crudeness, without seeking easy consensus.” Riccardo Muti’s Academy had previously entrusted him with a concert with excerpts from Nabucco at Teatro Galli in Rimini and Teatro Aligheri in Ravenna, with Orchestra Giovanile Luigi Cherubini.
Henry Kennedy is conducting La Bohème in October 2025 at the Wroclaw Opera where he has been a resident conductor and conducted numerous operas and concerts including Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Bizet’s Carmen and Les Pêcheurs de perles, an opera he also conducted at the Silesian Opera in Bytom.
In the Summer of 2023, as an assistant conductor to Sir John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, he contributed to the performance of Berlioz’s monumental opera Les Troyens, with performances at the Berlioz Festival in La Côte-Saint-André, Salzburg Festival, Opéra Royale in Versailles, Berliner Philharmonie and BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
He has been invited to conduct the Polish Radio Orchestra in Warsaw, Sudeten Philharmonic and Zielona Gora Philharmonic in Poland, and the Brasov Philharmonic in Poland.
He was assistant to Riccardo Muti at the Salzburg Festival and in Chicago, assistant to Christian Thielemann for the German and Austrian orchestral and operatic repertoire, assistant to Richard Bonynge for the interpretation of the French opera and the bel canto repertoire and in 2022 assistant to Bassem Akiki for the world première of Philippe Boesmans’ opera On purge bébé at Théâtre La Monnaie in Brussels.
He also trained alongside Marin Alsop, Sir Mark Elder, Edward Gardner, Hannu Lintu, Sir Simon Rattle, Jukka Pekka Saraste, Thomas Søndergård and John Wilson for operas and concerts with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich and London Philharmonic Orchestra.
Graduated in 2020, while studying conducting at the Royal Academy of Music in London he had received a scholarship for the Bayreuth Festival, where he conducted the Mozarteum Orchestra and the Austrian Ensemble for New Music, he founded the Resonate Symphony Orchestra, bringing together recent graduates from the best British conservatories, dedicating numerous concerts to composers such as Bach, Wagner, Bruckner and Shostakovich. In 2023 Henry Kennedy and the Resonate Symphony Orchestra opened the Deal Music & Arts Festival in Kent with an adventurous program that presented music from the eighteenth century to the present day.
