Jonathan Eaton has been Artistic Director of the Opera Theater of Pittsburgh for nine years. In that time he has led the company in presenting varied and unusual repertoire, most recently featuring American operas, with Kurt Weill’s Lost in the Stars  conducted by Julius Rudel, with the world premiere of Matthew Rosenblum’s multi-media opera RedDust, and Philip Glass’s Sound of a Voice which has been invited to tour to the Royal Opera Covent Garden.  Other American operas include the world premiere of Nathan Davis's Jazzopera Just Above My Head and the Pittsburgh premieres of William Bolcom's A View from the Bridge and Lee Hoiby's Summer and Smoke. In 2006 he directed a complete Ring Cycle in Jonathan Dove’s reduced orchestration for Opera Theater and Long Beach Opera. In his first year with the company he presented a major festival of works by Kurt Weill; the company's production of Weill's Die Bürgschaft/The Bond was chosen to open the Kurt Weill Festival in Dessau Germany in 2002 and 2003.  Other productions ranged from Bartok's modern masterpiece Bluebeard's Castle presented in a National Guard armory, to the world premiere of Jay Bolotin's jazz and sculpture opera Limbus--a mechanical opera. The company has continued to garner critical accolades and has won the WQED Harry Schwalb Award for artistic excellence and a number of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette top-ten musical events awards.

Jonathan Eaton has directed widely in opera houses throughout North America and Europe. In America his work has been seen at New York City Opera with Turandot, Carmen, and Cavalleria Rusticana and I Pagliacci, which were televised for nationwide broadcast on "Great Performances Live from Lincoln Center."  He has also directed for the Chicago Lyric, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Dallas, San Diego, Kentucky, Indianapolis and Memphis opera companies, and the Santa Fe and Spoleto festivals. In Canada he has directed for the Canadian Opera Company and Vancouver Opera; in Britain, he has directed at the Royal Opera Covent Garden, English National Opera, Welsh National Opera and Opera North; in Germany, he has directed for the Hannover State Opera, the Kurt Weill Festival in Dessau, the Bochumer Symphoniker and the Würzburg and Bielefeld operas. Elsewhere in Europe he has directed at the Netherlands Opera and the operas of Nantes, Lyons and Nancy.

In addition to continuing his work for Opera Theater, Mr. Eaton was recently appointed Director of !SING for Ruhr 2010 Cultural Capital of Europe, a project designed to get the populations of 53 cities singing in June 2010, culminating in the biggest concert ever staged with 65,000 singers in the Schalke football stadium. 

Photography by John Bauerlein