James Henshaw is an Olivier nominated Opera, Choral and Orchestral Conductor based in Berlin where he enjoys a varied life as both coach and freelance conductor. He studied Music at Clare College, Cambridge where he was a choral scholar and award winner as both conductor and pianist. He then went on to study repetiteuring at Guildhall School of Music and Drama. James has worked at many of the world’s top opera houses, including Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper, Hamburgische Staatsoper, English National Opera and L’Opéra de Rouen. He has conducted performances for English National Opera, Scottish Opera, Garsington Festival Opera, English Touring Opera and Longborough Festival Opera. This season he will make his debut with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Glyndebourne.

Having graduated from Guildhall with Distinction, he immediately went on to assist Mark Wigglesworth at the Aldeburgh Music Festival and at the Proms with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. That same year he was Chorusmaster for Monteverdi’s Orfeo at the Bayerische Staatsoper with Ivor Bolton. 

He joined English National Opera in August 2015 and became ENO’s youngest ever Chorus Master in August 2016. During his tenure the Chorus won a 2016 Olivier Award for ‘Outstanding Achievement in Opera’ and ‘Best Chorus’ at the International Opera Awards.

During James’s time at ENO he made his London Coliseum debut as 2nd conductor in Birtwistle’s Mask of Orpheus for which he received an Olivier award nomination. He conducted the UK premier of Jonathan Dove’s The Day After named by the Guardian as one of Classical music’s top 10 best things in 2017, Britten’s Paul Bunyan at Alexandra Palace and was due to conduct the final three performances of a new production of The Marriage of Figaro in April 2020 until the run of performances was cut short by the Covid-19 crisis.

Since Covid-19, James has been based in Berlin. He made his German conducting debut at the Hamburg Hochschule with a new piece Penelope, die, a feminist look at the character of Penelope, Orpheus’s wife. He returned to Hamburg in early 2023 to assist on a new production of Puccini’s Il Trittico.

James runs his own orchestra, The Outcry Ensemble, based in London. The Orchestra performs new music in each one of its concerts and has performed works by Kate Whitley, Joel Rust, Laurence Osborn, Josephine Stephenson and Freya Whaley-Cohen. They have recently completed a Beethoven Symphony Cycle. In 2021 they performed a complete cycle of Beethoven Symphonies to raise money for young freelance musicians. For more details, see here.

After a 2022 performance of Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem, he returned to Smith Square for Outcry’s Brahms festival with four concerts in February and March 2023.

James has conducted operas for many of the UK’s professional Opera companies. In 2015 James made his professional  conducting debut with four performances of La Bohème for English Touring Opera  He has since made his debut with Longborough Festival Opera and Garsington Opera with productions of Die Zauberflöte assisting Anthony Negus and Christian Curnyn respectively and conducting a performance with both companies. He has also been Assistant Conductor to Stuart Stratford at Scottish Opera with two performances of Johnathan Dove’s Flight.