David Lloyd-Jones

Lloyd-Jones was born in London, the son of Sir Harry Vincent Lloyd-Jones and wife Margaret Alwena Mathias. Before World War II, his family was evacuated and moved to West Wales to live on a farm. There he had no contact with classical music until the age of nine, when he studied Mozart in school. On his 10th birthday, his father took him to his first orchestral concert, at the Royal Albert Hall, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. He quickly developed a love of British music, including Ralph Vaughan Williams, and also of Russian music. He later attended Magdalen College, Oxford where in 1958 he gained a degree in German and Russian. A contemporary there was Dudley Moore, who played as leader of the college orchestra under Lloyd-Jones's baton. Lloyd-Jones began his professional career in 1959 as a répétiteur at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. He made his professional conducting debut in 1961 with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. He conducted the New Opera Company from 1961 to 1964. He continued to build his reputation as a freelance conductor for orchestral and choral concerts. He also conducted for BBC broadcasts and TV studio opera productions. In 1972 he was appointed assistant music director at Sadlers Wells Opera (now English National Opera), where he conducted a wide repertory which included the first British staging of War and Peace by Sergei Prokofiev.

Lloyd-Jones founded and became the first music director of Opera North in 1978, forming its orchestra, the English Northern Philharmonia (now the Orchestra of Opera North), of which he became artistic director. Over the course of twelve seasons, he conducted over fifty productions in Leeds and other Northern England venues. Highlights of his career at Opera North included the first British performance of Krenek's Jonny spielt auf and the British stage premiere of Richard Strauss's Daphne. Other notable Opera North productions which he conducted included Delius's A Village Romeo and Juliet, Borodin's Prince Igor, Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Berlioz's Les Troyens, Richard Jones's staging of The Love for Three Oranges, a double-bill coupling (as at their first performances) of Tchaikovsky's Iolanta and The Nutcracker – the latter choreographed by Matthew Bourne of Adventures in Motion Pictures – and the world premiere of Wilfred Josephs's Rebecca. He also conducted orchestral concerts for Opera North, including at festivals in France and Germany. He stepped down from the position of music director in 1990.

He married Carol (Carolyn) Whitehead in 1964, and there were two sons (Gareth and Simon) and a daughter (Vanessa). They lived at a flat in Chelsea and a cottage in Petworth, West Sussex. His wife died in 2016. He died in June 2022, aged 87. He was the nephew of the well-known British preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones.