Players & Singers
Our biography and profiles of principal players & singers.
David Bates
Artistic Director
A graduate of the Royal Academy of Music and of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, David Bates initially embarked on a professional singing career before turning to directing/conducting. Inspired by his work with such renowned conductors as Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Mark Minkowski, Andrea Marcon and Nicholas McGegan, and driven by a desire to articulate his own musical vision, he founded La Nuova Musica (LNM) in 2007.
Their most recent highlight was a semi-staged performance of Purcell Dido and Aeneas at the 2022 BBC Proms, described as a superbly evocative night in The Times and a highly shaped, highly articulated performance, a musical tour de force that filled the hall in Opera Today.
Highlights this season include his debut with the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century in the Netherlands; conducting Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea at The Grange Festival with La Nuova Musica and returning to the Komische Oper Berlin for Handel Hercules. Looking ahead his plans include further titles at the Komische Oper Berlin and Opéra de Rouen Normandie and his debut at the Theater an der Wien. With LNM he will appear at the London Handel Festival, continuing their series started in 2015, of works by Handel where, so far, they have completed Acis and Galatea, Berenice, Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, Il Duello Amoroso, Apollo e Dafne, Orlando and Alcina; and a Mozart Concert Arias programme at Wigmore Hall with Lucy Crowe, as one of his many appearances there.
Last season he conducted Alcina at Staatsoper Hannover, where he also conducted a new production of Monteverdi Orfeo; made his debut with Opéra de Rouen Normandie with Handel Serse and conducted a new production of Handel Saul at the Komische Oper Berlin. He explored Mozart and Beethoven with the Munich Symphony Orchestra and conducted Monteverdi madrigals and motets at Wigmore Hall.
Directing from the harpsichord, David’s previous opera productions have included Rinaldo for Glyndebourne on Tour; Cesti Orontea at the Innsbrucker Festwochen; Cavalli La Calisto for Cincinnati Opera; Iphigénie en Tauride at the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos in Lisbon and Vivaldi Farnace with the Tony Award-winning theatre director Garry Hynes at the Spoleto Festival in the United States.