Conductor, Kevin Mallon was brought up in Belfast. Northern Ireland. He studied at Chetham’s School of Music, the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, and at Dartington College of Arts, studying composition with Peter Maxwell Davies and conducting with John Eliot Gardiner, and specializing in baroque violin. He became concert-master with Le Concert Spirituel and Les Arts Florissants in Paris and led and directed The Irish Baroque Orchestra before moving to Canada to take up posts with Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and the University of Toronto, (positions he left to pursue his conducting career). In 1999 he founded the Aradia Ensemble, with whom he has toured widely, and become conductor of the Toronto Chamber Orchestra. With both of these orchestras he has made some 50 recordings for Naxos. A frequent conductor of Toronto’s Opera in Concert, together they have performed ten baroque operas. From 2005-2009, he was Artistic Director of the Irish company- Opera 2005; his seventh production with them being Verdi’s Ballo in Maschera in September 2008 for which he achieved his third Irish Times Theatre Award nomination. Kevin’s most recent appointments are as Music Director of the Thirteen Strings Chamber Orchestra in Ottawa (2010) and as Conductor of New York’s newly formed West Side Chamber Orchestra (2011). Since 2010, Mallon has also been the conductor for the summer program at the Centre for Operatic Studies in Italy.