Jeffrey Tate

Jeffrey Tate CBE (born 28 April 1943, Salisbury) is an English conductor.

Tate was born with spina bifida, and also has kyphosis. His family moved to Farnham, Surrey when he was young and he attended Farnham Grammar School between 1954 and 1961 gaining a State Scholarship to Cambridge University, where he directed theatre productions. Tate initially read medicine at Christ's College, Cambridge (1961–64), specializing in eye surgery. He later worked at St Thomas's Hospital, London, before giving up his clinical career to study music at the London Opera Centre. He became a repetiteur and a coach at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, under the tutelage of Sir Georg Solti.

Tate's international conducting début was with the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1979. In 1985, he was appointed the first principal conductor of the English Chamber Orchestra. He was named to the position of principal conductor of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden effective in September 1986, the first person in the House's history to have that title. He was principal conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra from 1991 to 1995. In 2005, he was appointed music director of the San Carlo Theatre of Naples. Tate's recordings include a series of Mozart piano concertos with Dame Mitsuko Uchida.

Tate has been president of UK Spina Bifida charity ASBAH (now SHINE) since 1989. A portrait of Jeffrey Tate is in David Blum's book Quintet, Five Journeys toward Musical Fulfillment (Cornell University Press, 1999). It originally appeared as an article in the 30 April 1990 issue of The New Yorker.

In October 2007, the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra announced the appointment of Tate as its next chief conductor, as of the spring of 2008.

Personal life

Tate is gay, which he has described as being an outsider on two scores. "The gay world is immensely hung up with physical perfection for some curious reason ... Therefore, being disabled in that world is harder". His partner is Klaus Kuhlemann, a German geomorphologist, whom he met when conducting at Cologne from 1977.

External links

• Biography from Hamburg Symphony (State: 2011)
• Biography from allmusic
• Theatre San Carlo
• Pieces, 2002 (article in Christ's College newsletter)
• ASBAH

Cultural offices
Preceded by no predecessor	Principal Conductor, English Chamber Orchestra 1985–2000	Succeeded by Ralf Gothóni
Preceded by James Conlon	Principal Conductor, Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra 1991–1995	Succeeded by Valery Gergiev
Preceded by Gary Bertini	Music Director, Teatro di San Carlo in Naples 2005–2010	Succeeded by Maurizio Benini
Preceded by Andrey Boreyko	Chief Conductor, Hamburg Symphony Orchestra 2009–present	Succeeded by incumbent