Biography

Mark Valencia, Opera Magazine, July 2024

JEREMY HANEMAN is a British Australian conductor and musical director who specialises in choral and operatic repertoire. He is passionate about using music and singing to create a difference in the world.

He is the Co-Director of Together Productions, a company that produces ground-breaking work using music and the arts to inspire social change. Jeremy is the director of Singing For Our Minds, a ground-breaking leadership course for choral directors around positive mental health recently featured on BBC One morning TV. Jeremy was one of two British conductors invited to present their work at the World Symposium of Choral Music in 2020. Jeremy is musical director of six ensembles in London and the South East and a trustee of the London Gay Men’s Chorus.

Jeremy has conducted concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal Festival Hall, the Barbican, Royal Opera House and internationally in Australia, the USA and across Europe. He has worked with many choirs from across the spectrum – from the BBC Singers and Cambridge Chamber and Chapel choirs and the King’s Singers; to other choirs ranging from the London Gay Men’s Chorus to community choirs with refugees and torture survivors, people of global majority, people experiencing mental health issues, people with disabilities and many others.  

From 2011 - 2020 he was the inaugural Community Chorus Director for the Royal Opera House Covent Garden where his work included being Artistic Director and Conductor for the acclaimed 150 voice Royal Opera House Thurrock Community Chorus. The Chorus has now become the Thames Opera Company where Jeremy is the Artistic Director. Jeremy has regularly worked with distinguished internationally renowned soloists from the ROH as well as members of the ROH Chorus, Orchestra and the Jette Parker Young Artists. He is involved in both the performance and commissioning of new music from composers and librettists such as John Barber, Hazel Gould, Mike Roberts, Sarah Grange, Morgan Hayes and Alexander Campkin. He has conducted joint concerts with the Chorus of the Royal Opera House.

Jeremy has run many workshops for the Royal Opera House on musicianship, choral conducting and vocal technique and he was the musical director and founder of the Royal Opera’s annual choral festival, FUSED that ran from 2011-2015.

Since 2017 Jeremy has conducted the world premieres of eight new commissions for community choruses involving musical workshops with refugees groups and people with mental health issues in the UK at a sell-out concerts at Milton Court, Barbican, the Royal Festival Hall, the Union Chapel, Tilbury Terminal and many others for the Singing Our Lives Project involving over 250 performers, and professional groups including the King’s Singers, Stile Antico, the Orchestra of Syrian Musicians and students from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, in conjunction with the International Organization for Migration, the United Nations Migration Agency.

In 2013 Jeremy co-founded the Mixed Up Chorus, a social justice choir in London who has performed for the Deputy Prime Minister and the Lord Chancellor and was featured on Songs of Praise on BBC 1 and several times on BBC Radio 3. The choir is known for its ground-breaking collaborations, such as with the Muslim Choral Ensemble of Sri Lanka, visual artists such as Alinah Azedah and the Buddhist Jazz Orchestra. For two seasons Jeremy was also guest Chorus Master for the National Symphony Chorus of Ireland where he prepared the 150-voice choir for performances with conductors Gerhard Markson and Paul McCreesh at the National Concert Hall of Ireland. 

Jeremy has also conducted choirs in London including Morley College Choir (five years) where his predecessors include Michael Tippett and Gustav Holst, and in 2013 he founded and continues to lead the multi-award winning choirs for Linklaters and Taylor Wessing, two major City law firms. Jeremy is also the musical director for One Day One Choir, a global annual movement for World Peace Day founded in 2014 that involves over a million singers from all around the world. Most recently Jeremy led the World Peace Day concert at the British Museum in London and he was the MD for June 2020 for the Global Song Circle, with guests the King's Singers. Jeremy was a visiting Professor of choral conducting at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama working with vocal and composition students for a season in 2018/19. 

Jeremy has been guest conductor for the Cambridge University Chamber Choir and he co-founded Cambridge choir Vox Cantab. Whilst at Cambridge he also conducted the Anima Singers and led a workshop for the Cambridge University Symphony Chorus. In London he has been the permanent conductor of the Amici Chamber Choir, Chorus Mundi and the London Gay Men’s Chorus (which he grew from 15 to 160 singers), as well as guest conductor for numerous ensembles including Highgate Choral Society, the Camerata of London Orchestra and Vision Opera. 

Jeremy has also worked in Sweden where he conducted international choirs such as the prize-winning Manado State University Choir from Indonesia and the acclaimed Voces Nordicae from Stockholm. Jeremy delivered the inaugural choral singing workshop for the Royal Society of the Arts, demonstrating the power of choral singing to bring communities together. 

As a composer and arranger Jeremy has written/arranged works especially for choirs and theatre, including being composer in residence for Pleasure for Pleasure Theatre Company, in venues such as the New End Theatre, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Academy and for the British Council on tour in Florence and Rome.

For seven years Jeremy was the Chairman of Hafla, a registered charity he founded that created cultural events that brought together Jewish and Arabic peoples, which involved cross-cultural concerts at the Royal Academy of Music; and for ten years he was the Director of Music at Fine Arts College in London.

Jeremy is a graduate of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and he did the inaugural Master of Music in choral conducting at the University of Cambridge where he studied with Stephen Layton and Sir Stephen Cleobury. Since 2012 he has been a Practitioner Council member of the Association of British Choral Directors for whom he has led many workshops, presentations and lectures, and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts.