Francis Travis

Francis Travis ( born July 9, 1921 in Detroit, Michigan ) is a Swiss conductor of U.S. origin.

Travis studied at Wayne University in Detroit, Michigan State University in East Lansing, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and finally at the University of Zurich, where he worked with a dissertation on Verdi with Paul Hindemith and Antoine- Elisée Cherbuliez a doctorate degree in musicology obtained. He also spent five years as student and later an assistant to Hermann Scherchen.

Since 1953 he works as a freelance conductor. He worked as a guest conductor with more than eighty orchestras throughout Europe and in Japan, China and Korea and performed at numerous European festivals and on radio and television. His repertoire ranges from works of the early baroque to the avant-garde of the 20th century. In addition to works of classical modernism ( Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Edgar Varese, Igor Stravinsky ), he conducted the world premieres of several hundred works by contemporary composers, particularly in the context of the concerts of the International Society for Contemporary Music ( ISCM ), the Swiss section he twelve years served as president, and of concert series of contemporary music in Oslo, Stockholm, Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Cologne.

In his CD recordings Travis focused on rare -established works such as by Joachim Raff and contemporary composers such as Bo Nilsson, Isang Yun and Mathias Spahlinger and worked with soloists such as Heinz Holliger, Hildegard Behrens and Sonia Theodoridou.

Travis had twenty-five years as a professor of conducting at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg. Among his pupils were, inter alia, Arturo Tamayo, Douglas Bostock, Burkhard Rempe, Eberhard Dietz, Robert HP Platz and Leendert Runia.

He was then chief conductor at the Basel Theatre and the Theater Trier as well as permanent guest conductor of the Nederlandse Opera Stichting in Amsterdam. From 1990 to 1995 he lived in Tokyo, where he worked as a conductor of various Japanese orchestra and choirs and taught conducting at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.

More recently he devoted himself increasingly to the Opera and has conducted at the Royal Opera House London, the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires and at the Teatro Real in Madrid.