The son of Protestant missionaries, American conductor John Nelson was born on December 6, 1941, in San José, Costa Rica. He began studying piano while living in Central America and continued those studies when his family moved back to the US and settled in Illinois. He attended the Juilliard School in New York from 1963 to 1967 to study conducting with Jean Morel and won the Irving Berlin Prize. He made his debut with the New York Chamber Orchestra and then conducted Berlioz's Les Troyens in a concert version at Carnegie Hall in 1972. He premiered Britten Owen’s Wingrave at the Santa Fe Opera before becoming musical director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra (1976-1987). Appointed as the head of the Caramoor Festival in Katonah, New York, he was in charge of the Ensemble orchestral de Paris from 1998 to 2008. With a focus on Berlioz operas, he conducted Béatrice et Bénédict with the Opéra de Lyon Orchestra (1992), Te Deum with the Orchestre de Paris (2001), Benvenuto Cellini with the Orchestre national de France (2004), Les Troyens (2017) and La Damnation de Faust (2019) with the Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra (2017) – both of which were awarded a Diapason d'or. He collaborated on the Arias album by Kathleen Battle and Itzhak Perlman (1992) and in recitals by Susan Graham, David Daniels, Stephanie Blythe and Vivica Genaux. In 2011, John Nelson initiated a long-term project, the Chicago Bach Project, with the American choral ensemble Soli Deo Gloria. After recording Harold in Italy with Timothy Ridout, Romeo and Juliet with Joyce DiDonato, and Handel's Messiah with Lucy Crowe and Michael Spyres, John Nelson died in Chicago on March 31, 2025, at the age of 83.
![Berlioz: Requiem (Grande Messe des morts) [Live]](https://cdn-images.dzcdn.net/images/cover/172bff0b9eddeb5ae8897b801343fb43/120x120-000000-80-0-0.jpg)
![Bohuslav Martinů, Sergei Prokofiev, Ernő Dohnányi: Cello Concertos [In Memoriam János Starker]](https://cdn-images.dzcdn.net/images/cover/7048f28527c974e8253509938c347094/120x120-000000-80-0-0.jpg)
