David fallis
Conductor David Fallis is one of Canada’s leading interpreters of operatic and choral/orchestral repertoire, known especially for his work in the Baroque and Classical periods, and contemporary music. He has conducted at the Royal Opera House in Versailles, the Glimmerglass Festival, the Singapore Festival, the Luminato Festival, Festival Vancouver, Houston Grand Opera, the Seoul Arts Centre, Cleveland Opera, Wolftrap Theater, and Utah Opera. This season, he looks forward to leading both the Winnipeg and Okanagan Symphony Orchestras for their presentations of Handel’s Messiah.
As Music Director for Opera Atelier he has helped bring that company onto stages around the world, and for them Mr. Fallis has conducted all the major Mozart operas, all the Monteverdi operas, and works by Purcell, Handel, Rameau, Lully, Charpentier and Weber. He led the company for all five of their triumphant appearances at the Royal Opera House in Versailles, and twice he led the Opera Atelier forces on tour to Seoul, South Korea.
On the symphonic stage, in 2019 Mr. Fallis made his debut with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra conducting Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, Fauré’s Requiem, and a world premiere by Andrew Balfour, all with the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir. He has conducted the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, Orchestra London, the Windsor Symphony, Symphony Nova Scotia, Symphony New Brunswick and the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra.
Mr. Fallis directs Soundstreams Choir 21, a vocal ensemble specializing in contemporary choral music, which has performed for Soundstreams Canada, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Art of Time Ensemble, and Continuum Contemporary Music. In 2019, for Soundstreams and Signal Theatre, he conducted Pimootewin by Melissa Hui and Tomson Highway, the world’s first opera in Cree, and Gállábártnit by Britta Bystrom and Rawdna Eira, the world’s first opera in Sami. He has conducted world premieres by many other leading Canadian composers, including James Rolfe, Christopher Butterfield, Christos Hatzis, Andrew Balfour and Andrew Ager.
Following his success in conducting the world premiere of R. Murray Schafer’s The Children’s Crusade at the 2009 Luminato Festival in Toronto, he was asked to conduct one of Schafer’s most ambitious works of music theatre, Apocalypsis, to great acclaim at the 2015 Festival.
From 2018-2020 he was Interim Conductor for the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, leading them throughout their 125th Anniversary Season. From 1990-2018 he was Artistic Director of the Toronto Consort, a renowned chamber group specializing in the music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Mr. Fallis has also worked in film and television. He led the Toronto Consort in music for Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter and was Historical Music Producer for Showtime’s acclaimed series The Tudors, featuring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Sam Neill and Peter O’Toole, and The Borgias, starring Jeremy Irons.
October 2024
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““Recreating the tremulous quality of opera on an historical knife edge, conductor David Fallis, in partnership with a brilliant 16-player ensemble courtesy Tafelmusik, strikes to the very core of genius, summoning all the colour and texture of Monteverdi’s daring score.” [Opera Atelier, The Return of Ulysses].”
