James Levine, who conducted a total of 2,552 performances as music director of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, was born in Cincinnati in 1943, the son of a violinist and a former Broadway actress. A piano-playing prodigy, Levine performed Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 2 Op. 40 (1837) with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra aged 10, but during his teenage years he was more drawn to conducting. He developed a career that retained a major place for teaching, particularly at the Ravinia Festival in Illinois, the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Levine appeared at the Met for the first time in 1971, conducting Puccini’s Tosca (1900). Five years later, he began his 40-year tenure as music director, conducting many of the company’s performances himself in a large repertory, with Verdi and Wagner prominent. Levine’s style favoured an expansive naturalness that appealed strongly to audiences in operas as different as Verdi’s sparkling comedy Falstaff (1901) and Strauss’ sumptuous Der Rosenkavalier (The Rose-Bearer, 1910); and a major event was the Metropolitan Opera staging, in 1999, of Schoenberg’s modernist opera Moses and Aaron (1932). Levine raised the company’s orchestral standards to world-class level, additionally conducting the players in a concert series initiated by him in Carnegie Hall, while singers appreciated his supportive accompanying skills during their performances. Levine was also the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 2004 to 2011, and continued to make regular guest appearances with the Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic and Staatskapelle Dresden orchestras. His later years were sadly clouded by health issues including Parkinson’s disease, before his death in 2021.