Leo Hussain

Conductor Leo Hussain has appeared with top orchestras and opera companies in many countries, interpreting music from Mozart to the contemporary era. He is also a noted composer whose works have appeared on several popular compilations. Hussain was born in Reading, west of London, in 1978, into a family of Pakistani background. As a youth, he sang as a treble in the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, and appeared on a 1991 recording of Bernstein's Chichester Psalms and Copland's In the Beginning conducted by Stephen Cleobury. Hussain studied at St. John's College, Cambridge, and then at the Royal Academy of Music. He rounded out his education at the Salzburg Festival as an assistant to three prominent conductors, Simon Rattle (with the Berlin Philharmonic), Valery Gergiev (with the Vienna Philharmonic), and Yannick Nézet-Séguin (in a production of Gounod's Roméo et Juliette). His career since then has emphasized opera and symphonic music equally. In 2004, Hussain became the music director at the English Touring Opera for its spring tours and the general music director of the Newbury Choral Society. In 2009, at age 31, Hussain moved on to the Salzburg Landestheater as music director. There, he conducted an unusually wide range of opera, and he has remained popular in Austria as both an operatic and a symphonic conductor. Also, in 2009, he led a new production of György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre at the Grand Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, and later, one of Enescu's rarely heard Oedipe at the same theater. Hussain also served as the principal conductor of the Opéra de Rouen Haute-Normandie in France. His compositions have appeared on three albums by the Rodolfus Choir. Hussain's guest conducting credits in opera include those at such prestigious houses as the Theater an der Wien in Vienna, the Bavarian State Opera, and the San Francisco Opera. As an orchestral conductor, he has led such groups as the BBC Philharmonic, the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Japan, and the Indianapolis Symphony. He has been heard on several recordings, backing Anaïs Gaudemard on an album of harp concertos by Ginastera, Boieldieu, and Debussy in 2016, and pianist See Siang Wong on the latter's Beethoven Trilogy 1 in 2020. In 2021, Hussain returned on the podium with the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, leading a performance of Saint-Saëns' one-act opera La Princesse Jaune.
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