Jesús López-cobos
Energetic Spanish conductor who worked with the LPO
JESÚS LÓPEZ-COBOS, who has died aged 78, was principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra from 1981 to 1986.
He also spent 15 years as music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and a decade with the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra, commitments that deprived British audiences of greater exposure to his precise rhythms and energising beat.
His recording with the LPO of Verdi’s Requiem starring Margaret Price, made during a concert at the Royal Festival Hall in 1983, is one of the most intense and dramatic accounts of the work, with Gramophone magazine reporting that his “conducting has fire, grace, and an enviably unselfconscious feel for the work’s musical and spiritual dynamic”.
Throughout his career López-cobos maintained a steady balance between symphonic and operatic work, conducting works such as Carmen, Norma and Tosca at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden. He was at his best working with fellow Spaniards such as the soprano Montserrat Caballé and the tenor José Carreras, and in March 1981 conducted them together at a gala concert for the Metropolitan Opera, New York.
Jesús López-cobos was born in Toro, northwest Spain, on February 25 1940. He grew up in the south of the country where there was little orchestral tradition and did not attend his first concert until he was 17. There was, however, music at home: his father was a Wagnerian while his mother, who “had a very pretty voice”, sang around the house.
He took a doctorate in philosophy at university in Madrid and started his music career by training a university choir. He took conducting lessons in Venice with Franco Ferrara, was assistant conductor at Madrid Opera from 1964 to 1966, and was coached by Hans Swarowsky in Vienna.
His professional conducting debut was at the Prague Spring Festival in 1968 and the following year he conducted Mozart’s The Magic Flute at La Fenice in Venice. In 1981 he was appointed music director of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, with whom in 1987 he conducted the first complete Ring Cycle to be seen in Japan.
Earlier, in 1980, Lópezcobos and Georg Solti, the LPO’S principal conductor, took the orchestra on a tour of Japan and South Korea.
The following year López-cobos and the LPO were delayed in Spain on the day of a London concert by an air traffic controllers’s strike. Although the musicians were able to fly during the afternoon, Spain was not then a member of the customs union and their instruments, which travelled separately, had to be checked and various permits stamped. Fortunately, friends of the orchestra had been pulling strings at HM Customs and, unusually, the instruments were waved through, arriving at the Royal Albert Hall just in time for the concert.
In 1982 López-cobos conducted the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber in the world premiere of the second cello concerto by Joaquín Rodrigo, with the blind Spanish composer present, at the Festival Hall.
He was appointed to the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in 1986, becoming its longest-serving principal conductor. In 2002 he was back at Covent Garden, sympathetically managing Luciano Pavarotti’s final appearances in Lópezcobos’s own edition of Puccini’s Tosca, the event even more highly charged than usual because the tenor’s mother had died two days earlier. In the first years of this century López-cobos was music director of the Teatro Real in Madrid.
For López-cobos there was no such thing as a perfect performance. “We all try,” he said, “but it never comes through. I think there has to be always room to do better.”
Jesús López-cobos was married several times. He is survived by his wife Brigitte and by three sons from earlier marriages.