David Hanlon

David Hanlon is a composer, conductor, and pianist praised by Maestro Patrick Summers as “one of the major compositional voices of the young generation.” Minnesota Opera recently tapped David for its New Works Initiative, and over the next seven years he will create a full-scale opera, chamber opera, and song cycle for the company. David is currently writing the chamber opera, The Pigeon Keeper with librettist Stephanie Fleischmann, commissioned by by Santa Fe Opera. David’s last collaboration with Stephanie was the chamber opera After the Storm, whose premiere he conducted at Houston Grand Opera. The Houston Chronicle lauded the score as “haunting” and “stirringly successful.” David has often written work for Houston Grand Opera (HGOco), including his chamber opera Past the Checkpoints about undocumented immigrants (featured in Opera America’s 2014 New Works Forum) the chamber vocal piece The Ninth November I Was Hiding, about his grandfather's arrest during Kristallnacht, and Power, based on a text by a high-schooler about bullying.

David often works with Wolf Trap Opera, which recently premiered his orchestration of Pauline Viardot’s Cendrillon, praised by Opera News for its many“charms” and its “savory, nearly Straussian shimmer.” The orchestration will be revived by Knoxville Opera this coming season. His other Wolf Trap commissions include the children’s opera Listen, Wilhelmina! which has been revived at Wolf Trap and Lyric Opera of Kansas City. With Wilhelmina librettist Kathleen Kelly, David wrote Texanische Liebeslieder about German immigration to Texas, based on oral histories in the Texas German dialect archives at UT-Austin. Since its premiere, it has been revived several times in Austin and Ann Arbor, and broadcast on Austin’s KMFA.

David is also a conductor with a focus in new work, praised by the Washington Post for his interpretive skills and “precise baton.” He recently made his Kennedy Center debut in the world premiere of The Ice Cream Truck is Broken!, devised and hosted by Mo Willems and Renée Fleming, with the Washington National Opera Orchestra. This fall, David made his debut conducting at Minnesota Opera his new orchestration of the Mariachi opera Cruzar la cara de la luna. David has long been associated with the Mariachi operas written by Pepe Martinez, Javier Martinez, and Leonard Foglia, including Cruzar (HGO World premiere and recording, as well as its revivals in Houston, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Diego Opera, Arizona Opera, and New York City Opera) El Pasado Nunca Se Termina (World premiere at Lyric Opera of Chicago, and revivals at San Diego and HGO and Fort Worth.) and, also at HGO, the world premiere of El Milagro del Recuerdo, which he also co-arranged.

For his conducting debut at Chicago Opera Theatre, David conducted Stefan Weisman and David Cote's The Scarlet Ibis. David has also conducted the world premieres at HGO of Gregory Spears’ The Bricklayer, Jack Perla's River of Light, andJeeyoung Kim’s From My Mother’s Mother. He conducted the premiere of Perla’s Love/Hate for the San Francisco Opera Center.

David served as Lorin Maazel’s assistant conductor for the Castleton Festival, where he prepared La Fanciulla del West for performances in Castleton and Spain, prepared both chorus and orchestra for concert performances, at times substituting for the Maestro in those concerts on short notice. In addition to his conducting and composing work at HGO, He assisted on numerous productions, including the premieres of Spears's O Columbia, Iain Bell's A Christmas Carol, André Previn's Brief Encounter and Christopher Theofanidis's The Refuge in addition to productions of Lohengrin, Tosca, Serse, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He is a graduate of the Houston Grand Opera Studio. He is also a former Adler Fellow with San Francisco Opera. As an Adler, he conducted the premiere of Jack Perla’s Love/Hate and debuted his four hand piano piece ¡Bang Kiss Kiss Bang! He assisted on SFO operas including Nixon in China, Siegfried, Don Giovanni, and the premiere of Heart of a Soldier. He also works as an assistant conductor and chorus master at Wolf Trap Opera (where he currently serves as Head of Music Staff) and Washington Concert Opera. He also served as a pianist and harpsichordist at Dallas Opera and Philadelphia Opera.

David is a graduate of the Manhattan School of Music and Wesleyan University. He lives in Washington D.C. with his wife and two daughters.