Jack Sheen
© Hugo Glendinning
fierceness and precision
Conductor, Composer
Co-Director of London Contemporary Music Festival
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‘A welcome blaze of fierceness, imagined with perfect precision’
The Daily Telegraph
Jack Sheen is a conductor and composer from Manchester, recognised for his inventive approach to music-making, which blends orchestral traditions with an expansive interdisciplinary perspective. His own music spans orchestral and chamber compositions, installations and site-specific spatial performances, cultivating a compositional understanding in his interpretations of core repertoire that have been praised for their precision and insight.
Sheen has conducted a range of leading orchestras, including London Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, and all the BBC orchestras, as well as contemporary music specialists such as Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, Ensemble 10:10, Bit20 Ensemble, London Sinfonietta, Manchester Camerata, and Klangforum Wien. This season he makes his debut with the Ulster Orchestra. Equally at home in opera, he made his Royal Opera House debut in 2022 conducting the world premiere of Oliver Leith and Matt Copson’s Last Days, to great acclaim, which returns to Covent Garden later this year. In 2024 he conducted an ‘incisive’ and ‘wonderfully precise’ (The Guardian) new production of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress with English Touring Opera. He is scheduled to conduct Sir George Benjamin’s Lessons in Love and Violence at Teatro Real Madrid.
Sheen enjoys working on interdisciplinary projects that include his own compositions, and has been commissioned and had works performed by many of the orchestras and ensembles he conducts, alongside commissions from eminent arts organisations such as Venice Biennale, Casa de Serralves in Porto, and London’s V&A and Camden Art Centre. Recent projects include Lag, a spatialised orchestral piece commissioned by BBC SSO and Ilan Volkov for Tectonics Festival; Press, a piano quintet commissioned by Wigmore Hall and Apartment House; and Ceremony Container, a spatialised performance commissioned by Ensemble Mosaik and Berlin’s Silent Green. The 2025-26 season will see Sheen working with artist Eve Stainton and Bold Tendencies.
‘I believe that the next important step for classical music is to bring it into dialogue with wider cultural conversation, rather than changing the art itself or the rituals that surround it. This is a responsibility for artists and curators’
