David Stern

David Stern is the founder and director of the Paris-based opera company and period-instrument ensemble, Opera Fuoco, and artistic advisor and principal conductor of the Shanghai Baroque Festival. He is chief conductor of the Palm Beach Opera in Florida and music director of opera at the Crested Butte Music Festival in Colorado.

In his time as music director of the Israel and the St Gallen Opera houses he championed 18th century opera and eclectic works such as Simone Mayr's Medea, Berg's Wozzeck, Britten’s Turn of the Screw and Weill's Rise of Rall of the City of Mahagonny. He has premiered four new operas since 2010: Gil Shohat’s The Child Dreams at the Israel Opera, Nicolas Bacri's Cosi Fanciulli commissioned by Opera Fuoco and performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, Ben Moore's Enemies, A Love Story in Palm Beach and Jan Sandström’s The Rococo Machine in Drottningholm, Sweden in June 2016. With Opera Fuoco, he has recorded J. C. Bach's opera Zanaida in Leipzig, Paris, Vienna and Malta and released a CD of French Romantic Cantatas with the mezzo-soprano Karine Deshayes.

Since launching the Aix Festival International Academy in 1998, Stern has been committed to developing young voices. He created Opera Fuoco in 2003 as a platform to train young French singers in repertoire ranging from Monteverdi to John Cage. In 2016 he conducted the Magic Flute at The Juilliard School.