Finnegan is a young conductor and pianist from London who balances a growing international career with his role as music director of Shadwell Opera.
He is increasingly recognised as an ardent proponent of music of the 20th and 21st centuries, and has a particular interest in working with singers in opera and in recital. This season he makes his debuts with the Polish National Opera in Lublin (Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt) and Scottish Opera (Turnage’s Greek) as well as conducting a new production of Peter Maxwell Davies The Lighthouse with Shadwell Opera, having previously conducted productions of operas by George Benjamin and Jonathan Dove, Mark-Anthony Turnage and Schoenberg, as well as fully staged performances of music theatre works by Maxwell Davies, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Walton. Since 2014 he has worked for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden as a musical assistant, most recently on Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel, having acted as the assistant and orchestral pianist in the work’s creation at the Salzburg Festspiele. Future plans for the coming season involve acting as an assistant conductor for the Zurich Opera (Parsifal) and Bayerische Staatsoper (From the House of the Dead), as well as making his debut with the RTE Concert Orchestra in Dublin.
He graduated from both Cambridge University and the Royal Academy of Music with the highest possible honours. After being awarded a fellowship to continue his work with the Academy in an exploration of Mahler’s complete song catalogue, he was this year elected an Associate for outstanding contribution to the music industry.
