English conductor Graeme Jenkins is renowned for his wide-ranging repertoire, spanning from the early Baroque to contemporary music, and for his extensive experience in the field of opera. Throughout his career, he has conducted approximately 120 different works in 201 opera productions at many of the world’s leading opera houses, including the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the Glyndebourne Festival, English National Opera, Welsh National Opera, Scottish Opera, and Opera North in the United Kingdom; the Grand Théâtre de Genève; the Bavarian State Opera; the Vienna State Opera; the Opéra national de Paris; Deutsche Oper Berlin; Dutch National Opera; Oper Köln; Theater an der Wien; the Hungarian State Opera in Budapest; the Royal Danish Opera; the Royal Swedish Opera; Opera Australia; the Canadian Opera Company; and Glimmerglass Opera.

Highlights of the 2026/27 season include a symphonic programme with the Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana, featuring Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben and Saint-Saëns’s Cello Concerto, as well as a return to the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, where he will conduct Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs.

In spring 2025, Graeme Jenkins made his house debut at the Hamburg State Opera conducting Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades. He made his debut at the Vienna State Opera in 2005 with Willy Decker’s acclaimed production of Britten’s Billy Budd, starring Simon Keenlyside in the title role. In the years that followed, he returned regularly to Vienna, conducting productions including Jenůfa, Der fliegende Holländer, Billy Budd, Lohengrin, Káťa Kabanová, The Tempest, Johannes Maria Staud’s Die Weiden, Il barbiere di Siviglia, Cavalleria rusticana, Pagliacci, Madama Butterfly, Peter Grimes, La fanciulla del West, and Otello, both in Vienna and on the company’s tour to Seoul.

In 2017, he made his debut at the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos with Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Since then, he has conducted Peter Grimes, Alceste, Parsifal, Rusalka, Iolanta, Der fliegende Holländer, Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem, Beethoven’s Fidelio during the 2023/24 season, and symphonic concerts featuring Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony. During the 2024/25 season, he returned to Lisbon to conduct Britten’s War Requiem and Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust.

At the beginning of his operatic career, Graeme Jenkins served as Music Director of Glyndebourne Touring Opera from 1986 to 1991. From 1994 until 2013, he was Music Director of The Dallas Opera, where he also oversaw the company’s move into the Winspear Opera House, designed by Lord Foster as part of the AT&T Performing Arts Center. Among the highlights of his tenure was conducting Richard Wagner’s complete Ring Cycle, making him the youngest British conductor to do so. Other notable productions included Wozzeck, Jenůfa, Ariodante, Lohengrin, Boris Godunov, The Queen of Spades, Tristan und Isolde, Lucia di Lammermoor, and Die Zauberflöte.

Graeme Jenkins is also a highly sought-after symphonic conductor and has appeared with orchestras including the Minnesota Orchestra, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the Houston Symphony, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, the Colorado Symphony, the Utah Symphony, the Santa Rosa Symphony, the San Antonio Symphony, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Canberra Symphony Orchestra, the Gulbenkian Orchestra, the Portuguese National Orchestra of Porto, the Real Filharmonía de Galicia, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the Orchestre National de Lyon, the Orchestre Symphonique de Toulon, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Danish Orchestra, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne, the Duisburg Philharmonic, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, and many others.

Graeme Jenkins’s discography includes a recording of works by Paul Juon with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra for JPC, as well as a Deutsche Grammophon recording of Verdi arias with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the Chinese soprano Liping Zhang.