Opera Director David Kneuss Named as 2024 BU College of Fine Arts Convocation Speaker
Photo courtesy of David Kneuss
Opera Director David Kneuss will be the 2024 CFA Convocation Speaker
BU College of Fine Arts alum, David Kneuss (CFA’70), recently completed his tenure at the Metropolitan Opera where he served as Executive Stage Director for 25 years and directed nearly 100 productions.
BU College of Fine Arts is thrilled to announce that opera director David Kneuss (CFA’70), a recipient of CFA’s Distinguished Alumni Award, will be the 2024 CFA Convocation Speaker!
David Kneuss has recently completed his tenure at the Metropolitan Opera where he served as Executive Stage Director for twenty-five years and where he directed nearly one hundred productions. In addition to the Met, Kneuss has also directed productions for the opera companies of San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Boston, Portland Oregon, Bonn, Germany, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, the English National Opera and Hyogo Performing Arts Center in Nishinomiya, Japan, where he recently staged Don Giovanni, completing the Mozart/Da Ponte trilogy for that company.
Having a career-long association with Seiji Ozawa, Kneuss first staged opera for Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood, Boston’s Symphony Hall, and Carnegie Hall. In Japan, he has directed more than 30 productions for Ozawa’s music festivals and continues to create productions for the Ozawa Matsumoto Festival and the Ozawa Music Academy, where Kneuss also serves as Artistic Director and where he most recently recreated his production of Così fan tutte.
Kneuss created a production of La Damnation de Faust at Matsumoto Castle, which was the first outdoor production ever presented by the Saito Kinen Festival and was seen by an audience of 5000. His Peter Grimes, a joint venture between the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Saito Kinen Festival, began at the Tanglewood Music Center to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the opera’s American and was featured in a film entitled A Tale of Tanglewood.
Kneuss continues to create new opera productions and is currently preparing a new production of Verdi’s La Traviata for the Ozawa Music Academy in Kyoto, Japan to debut in the spring of 2025.
CFA CLASS OF 2024, YOU’RE UP NEXT!
Congratulations to our soon-to-be-graduates! This year’s Convocation ceremony for the CFA Class of 2024 will be held on Saturday, May 18 at the BU Track & Tennis Center starting at 4pm.