| Biography | Jeffrey Tate CBE (born 28 April 1943, Salisbury, died 2 June 2017) was a glabally renowned English conductor born with severe disabilities who qualified as a doctor but immediately gave up medicine for music.
Tate was born with congenital spina bifida, and also had kyphoscoliosis. 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 (19611964), 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 Mitsuko Uchida. Since 2009 he head been Chief Conductor of the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra. Since leaving the ECO and Covent Garden in the mid-1990s he had largely vanished from the British musical scene, save for a run of Der Fliegende Hollander at Covent Garden in 2011.
In April 2017 Tate was knighted by the Duke of Cambridge, having previously been apointed OBE.
Tate was President of Shinem the UK Spina Bifida charity ASBAH since 1989. |