John Nelson (1941-2025)

The genial American conductor John Nelson, who was particularly acclaimed for his interpretations of Berlioz, has died aged 83.

The child of Protestant missionaries, Nelson was born in San José, Costa Rica in 1941, and began learning the piano at the age of six; he was persuaded to pursue a career in music by American choral conductor John Finley Williamson, who noted Nelson’s potential when he attended a short course at Westminster Choir College in New Jersey. Nelson, whose Christian faith was strongly intertwined with his approach to music throughout his life, would later recall that Williamson’s words of encouragement were ‘like the voice of God’; he went on to enrol at Wheaton College Illinois (initially as a first-study pianist) and completed his studies at Juilliard, where conducting became his main focus.

Shortly after graduation, Nelson was urged to explore Berlioz’s Les Troyens by the opera producer and manager Matthew Epstein, who ‘thought I should do something impressive to get my name out there’ and pointed him towards Colin Davis’s newly-released recording of the opera with Jon Vickers and Josephine Veasey. Speaking to Presto on the 150th anniversary of Berlioz’s death, Nelson recounted that hearing the recording ‘lit something up in me which has remained with me all my life’, and in 1972 he conducted the US premiere of the complete opera in concert at Carnegie Hall. Although Nelson self-deprecatingly claimed that the ensuing critical acclaim was largely down to the fact that ‘reviewers didn’t know the piece’, the performance put him firmly on the New York radar and two years later he conducted it for his Metropolitan Opera debut, stepping in for an ailing Rafael Kubelík to lead a cast which included Vickers, Shirley Verrett and Christa Ludwig.

Nelson would go on to conduct a further eight productions of Les Troyens in the course of his life, and Berlioz’s music sat at the heart of his repertoire for his entire career: his discography includes recordings of Béatrice et Benédict with Susan Graham and Jean-Luc Viala, Benvenuto Cellini (with Gregory Kunde in the title-role and a young Joyce DiDonato as Ascanio), and Les nuits d’été with both Graham and David Daniels.

In 2017 he embarked on a new series of Berlioz recordings with the Orchestre philharmonique de Strasbourg on Erato, beginning with an account of Les Troyens which won so many awards that we had to reconfigure our product-page here at Presto: Nelson described the project as ‘the highlight of my entire life’, and subsequent recordings of the Grande Messe des Morts (made live at St Paul’s Cathedral in 2019), La damnation de Faust, Roméo et Juliette, Harold en Italie and other works were received with scarcely less enthusiasm.

Aside from Berlioz, Nelson was also a fine interpreter of Baroque music, with highlights on record including a 1990 account of Handel’s Semele with Kathleen Battle in the title-role, Bach arias with Battle and Itzhak Perlman, and a superb Messiah with The English Concert captured live at Coventry Cathedral in late 2022 (which turned out to be his penultimate recording). Contemporary music was another of his great passions, and in 1993 he set up the not-for-profit organisation Soli Deo Gloria (no relation to the record-label established by another Berlioz conductor who shares his forename) in order to champion and commission new sacred choral works.

In its early days the company did much to promote the music of Henryk Górecki in the United States, and later collaborated with over thirty composers including James MacMillan, Gavin Bryars, Roxanna Panufnik and Augusta Read Thomas. SDG’s work also encompassed the ‘Project Uplift’ initiative, which saw Nelson leading massed performances of core sacred choral repertoire in Asia (including the Chinese premiere of Brahms’s German Requiem in 1996).

Nelson’s final recording project was a live account of Mozart’s Requiem, made in Lausanne in February 2023 using a new critical edition by Bärenreiter; a planned recording of Bizet’s Carmen on Erato later that spring was cancelled after he became ill, although the label’s President Alain Lanceron yesterday revealed that he had been looking forward to completing his Berlioz cycle in Strasbourg next month. Nelson died on 31st March; among the artists who paid tribute to him on social media yesterday was the baritenor Michael Spyres (a mainstay of the Strasbourg project), who extolled his ‘generosity, sensitivity, and musicality’ and described him as ‘the epitome of what a Maestro ought to be’.

John Nelson - a selected discography