Alan Woodbridge is one of the leading choral directors working in the field of opera. For 20 seasons he worked at the Opéra de Lyon, first as a répétiteur, and later as chorus director under Kent Nagano. He contributed to numerous opera recordings, including L’elisir d’amore, Les Contes d’Hoffmann, The Rake’s Progress, La sonnambula, Werther, La Damnation de Faust, Lohengrin, Doktor Faust (which won a Grammy Award) and Ariadne auf Naxos.
During his time in Lyon his many projects also included a Pushkin-Tchaikovsky trilogy with Kirill Petrenko and Peter Stein, and a production of Parsifal with Kazushi Ono and François Girard. With the Chorus of the Opéra de Lyon he toured to Tokyo, San Francisco, Vienna, Athens, Edinburgh, Pesaro, Ravenna, Amsterdam, Paris, Aix-en-Provence and Frankfurt am Main.
From 2014 to 2023 he was chorus director at the Grand Théâtre de Genève, where he worked with Jonathan Nott and Ulrich Rasche on Elektra, with Antonio Fogliani on Aida and Nabucco and with Stefano Montanari and Mariame Clément on Donizetti’s Tudor operas. He was chorus master under Marc Minkowski for Les Contes d’Hoffmann at the 2024 Salzburg Festival.
Most recently he has worked on a production of Il trovatore with Anna Netrebko at the Chorégies d’Orange. In 2026 he will be the musical director for Eric Whitacre’s The Sacred Veil as part of Martin Harriague’s dance piece Awen in Avignon.
Alan Woodbridge studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and at the Royal College of Music in London, and has worked for companies such as the English National Opera, British Youth Opera, Opera North, the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam and the Semperoper Dresden. In 2014 he was awarded the title of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
