Justin Lavender is co-founder and Musical Director of Arcadian Opera, established in North Buckinghamshire in 2016, and celebrated for its groundbreaking and influential revival of Ethel Smyth’s masterpiece The Wreckers, staged in 2018 for the centenary of women’s suffrage, a cause strongly espoused by the composer. Arcadian Opera was the first company to perform live between the recent pandemic lockdowns, with an open-air production of Dido and Aeneas on the front steps of Stowe House, with distanced rehearsals in local gardens and farms. Justin also conducts the Phoenix Singers based in Oxfordshire in harness with the Trinity Camerata Orchestra, a combination which has swiftly achieved a reputation for musical excellence in the area.
Justin Lavender was persuaded by Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten to abandon nuclear engineering for music. He made his international debut in The Pearl Fishers at the Sydney Opera House. In 1990 he made debuts at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, singing the leading role of Arnold in Rossini’s spectacular masterpiece Guillaume Tell, and at the Vienna State Opera as Tamino in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. His debut at La Scala, Milan, in the title role of Rossini’s Le Comte Ory came the following year. More recent performances have included the title role in Gounod’s Faust at Covent Garden, Florestan in Beethoven’s Leonore with the Chelsea Opera Group, Don José with the Welsh National Opera, Loge in Wagner’s Das Rheingold for the Latvian National Opera and at Norway’s Bergen Festival, Ruis in Donzetti’s Maria Padilla for Washington Concert Opera, Pollione in Bellini’s Norma for English Touring Opera, and Don José again in the Royal Opera’s co-production with the Taiwan National Symphony.
He has worked on the concert platform with Solti, Giulini, Haitink, Oramo, Slatkin, Rhozhdestvensky, Dutoit, Frühbeck de Burgos, Elder and Abbado, and is particularly associated with Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, Verdi’s Requiem, Mahler’s 8th Symphony, Britten’s War Requiem and Schmidt’s vast oratorio Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln (The Book of Seven Seals). Justin sang Verdi's Requiem for the final concert of the 300th Anniversary Season of the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford Cathedral, the world's oldest music festival.
In 2006 he sang Gerontius at the Berlin Festival and recorded it with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra on a CD released for the Elgar 150th anniversary celebrations in 2007. This recording was the Editor’s Choice in Gramophone magazine: Alan Blyth wrote, “The best modern Gerontius… Justin Lavender surpasses all recent interpreters.”
Justin’s other recordings include solo CDs with the Bournemouth Symphony of Mozart, Rossini and Donizetti arias as well as leading roles such as Arturo in Bellini’s IPuritani, Fernand in Donizetti’s La Favorite, Mark in Smyth’s The Wreckers, Pierre Bezuhov in Prokofiev’s War and Peace, Schnittke’s Faust Cantata with the Hamburg Symphony and Janáček’s Otčenáš (The Lord’s Prayer). He appeared in Alan Parker’s film The Life of David Gale, on general release and DVD.
For eight years Justin wrote a regular column for The Irish Examiner, and he has contributed articles and book reviews to newspapers and professional journals. He is a Professor of Vocal Studies at the Royal College of Music, London and for ten years was Vocal Consultant to the men of King’s College Chapel Choir, Cambridge, working alongside the late Sir Stephen Cleobury. He has several times performed Mahler’s Das Lied von Der Erde in the original Tang Dynasty Chinese, most recently in Vienna and Hong Kong. As well as giving frequent masterclasses, he has a private teaching practice at his home in Castlethorpe.
Justin is increasingly in demand as a conductor of both opera and oratorio. From 2013 to 2015 he was artistic and musical director of Opera at Bearwood, in Berkshire. At Bearwood he conducted Puccini's Le Villi, Bizet's Carmen, Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, Gounod's Romeo and Juliet and Smetana's The Bartered Bride. In addition he has worked with a number of leading choral societies both as conductor and as vocal coach. In 2016 he directed the Epsom Twinning Choral Festival, with six hundred singers from the UK, Germany, France and Belgium. Alongside Arcadian Opera co-founder and stage director Alison Marshall he has conducted Puccini’s La Bohème, Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love (in his own rhymed translation), Smyth’s The Wreckers, Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Mozart’s The Magic Flute, all with orchestra and fully-staged, as well as numerous operatic galas. The company is currently in rehearsals for Gounod’s Faust, and next year will perform Don Giovanni and Carmen. Arcadian Opera has been commissioned to stage the world premiere in 2024 of Nicholas Smith’s opera The Stone God, at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London.
A founder member of the Newlands Rowing Club, Justin still rows occasionally on the Thames and the Nene, and his engineering instincts find outlet in an extensive model based on the Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway in the 1930s.